Lord of the Night

Zso Sahaal

It was not a gentle awakening.

In the dark, in the spine of the great shattered vessel that had delivered him, the hunter surfaced from his slumber with a hiss. He gagged on dust-dry lungs, pulled a rattling breath through parched lips, tipped back his head, and screamed.

He had been human, once. Even now, through a haze of time and trauma, he recalled how it had been to awake as a mere man: senses flickering to life, memories accreting, dreams receding like echoes. And all of it without panic, without horror: a shadow-gallery of clumsy, flawed processes for clumsy, flawed creatures.

Not so now. Here in the dark, in the smoke and filth and dirtied snow, such gentle comforts seemed an alien indulgence.

The hunter tore his way to alertness with a feral shriek, and his first thought was this:

It has gone. Someone has taken it.

The hull was cracked.

Blasted apart where tectonic forces had played along its seams, its frescoed surfaces lay lacerated, ragged edges gathering forests of icicles. Beyond the fissures the night swarmed with snow: thick eddies undulating like the surface of an inverted ocean. Lightning flickered in the distance, shooting long shadows across the huge vessel's broken corridors.

The hunter scrambled from the crippled hull without pause, casting out his senses, seeking movement. To his nocturnal eyes the ship was an empty city: a landscape of broken towers and plateaux brimming with snow, cocooned by a curtain of ice.

Locating the thieves required little effort. Picking their cautious way along the ship's surface, each inelegant footstep was a thunder-strike in his ears. Protected from the weather by shaggy overcoats, eyes made beady and black by crude snow-goggles, they seemed to the hunter reminiscent of ancient primates: grizzled ape-things investigating a hulk from the stars. He, then, was a demigod hunting monkey.

The fools. The thieves.

They had taken it.

They were hurrying, he saw. Perhaps they'd heard his waking scream, perhaps they recognised they were not alone on the ship carcass they'd plundered. Their terror was gratifying, and as he stalked them the hunter ululated once more: a whoop of mingled anger and excitement. He soared across the uneven sprawl of the forward decks with disdainful ease, spring-locked feet barely touching the pitted hull, and swooped to find cover in the shadows of a collapsed buttress. From there, shielded, he could watch his prey, slipping and stumbling, reacting with comical horror to the wind-borne screech.

There were twelve. Ten carried weapons: spindly rifles with torches slung underneath, puddles of light that picked their way down the craft's broken flanks.

The hunter needed no torch.

The remaining two, he saw, carried the group's prize: a sheet of shrapnel forming an improvised stretcher, piled high with plunder. Useless gewgaws, mostly, handfuls of intestinal cabling, chunks of technology ripped from rune-daubed panels. He was too distant to make out the blocky shape he'd been seeking amongst the haul — that sacred item whose theft he would sooner die than permit — but it was certainly there, in amongst the loot. He could feel it...

He scuttled vertically like some great spider, rising along the filigree of a command tower, blue-black limbs impelled by silent streams of heated air, oozing from his back in shimmering ribbons. A single bound — legs pulled up close to his chest, arms outstretched — and he sailed above his oblivious quarry, landing upon the barrel of a crippled cannon, its segments arching in rib-like curves above the broken deck. Settling, glutted with the exhilaration of flight, he hunched on all fours and threw back his head to howl once again, a gargoyle wreathed in snow and night.

To the preythings, the clumsy thieves with their guns and lights, the cry must have seemed to have come from everywhere at once: a voice on the cusp of the snowstorm.

Their careful progress collapsed.

Several dropped their weapons and started to run, voices swallowed by the wind. Slipping on icy metal, they went bolting and crying into the dark, scattering across the endless contours of the vast wreckage.

The hunter smiled, enjoying their disarray. Deep within ornate greaves and spine-tipped segments of armour his muscles bunched and flexed, legs propelling him out into the swirling void, ancient technology holding him aloft.

He took the first two — stragglers — as they stumbled along the crest of a propulsion exhaust, hooking his talons through the first's shoulders. Pinned against the splintered metal of a vertical plate, eyes bulging, the thief barely had time to moan before a casual flick removed head from body, arterial paste bright against the ruffled white of his furs.

The second man cast a curious glance over his shoulder and tripped, gagging at the shape picked out in his torchlight. Hunched over his first victim's body, the hunter cocked his head like an eagle, baleful eyes glowing, and scissored his claws together.

'E-emperor...' the thief gurgled, feet skidding on the icy hull, gun tumbling from his grip. 'Emperor preserve...'

The hunter was on him without appearing to move: long blades punching through the man's arms, pinioning him like a butterfly to a page. And slowly, revelling in his captive's panicked moans, the hunter brought his face down and whispered through the settling snow, voice cracked and distorted by voxcaster static.

'Scream for me.'

The others were simple, after that.

Haunted by their comrade's dying shrieks, any vestiges of an orderly retreat were extinguished. Fighting to flee whatever nightmare stalked them, they barely noticed that they were separating out, losing their way. He picked them off one by one with impunity – these panicking fools, these nothing-men — eagerly acquainting them with the force of his anger.

They had stolen it. Stolen from him.

He cut them and gloried in their screams. He prolonged their punishments with musical control: a chorus of shrieks to further horrify their comrades. Some he toyed with, slashing sinews and joints, others he ripped apart, snatching up their heads in razor claws and pitching them at the survivors, knocking them down like players in some grisly sport. He was a whirlwind of vengeance, a dervish-fury that cut through the scum with the contempt their theft deserved.

Unseen, unheard, he sculpted their fears and stoked their imaginations. With no idea what monster was amongst them their minds conjured possibilities more horrific than even he could hope to inflict.

And then only three remained — those that had kept their senses about them — and he clawed his way along the outcroppings of a shattered bulkhead to watch them from above, to decide how they would die.

Two were the litter carriers, he saw, still struggling to bear their plunder. The third — a larger figure with a malformed bulge on his shoulders — guided them, his gun trained on their backs, supplanting their fear with the far more immediate threat of extinction. A large electoo — a spiral dissected by a stylised bolt of lightning — shimmered at the centre of his forehead: a crude symbol of authority.

A leader, then. Some avarice-riddled fool, more intent on preserving the fortune he'd looted than on preserving his own life. The hunter hissed to himself, happy to oblige.

He cast his nocturnal gaze through the morass of broken hullplates and smoking wreckage, sighting along the path his prey were taking, pondering the possibilities of an ambush. And then panic assailed him.

From here the full extent of the massive vessel's calamitous impact was clear to see. At its beak-like prow, now blunted and smoothed to a sheen by the heat of its descent, it had clawed a scarred wedge of rock from the ground, an ethereal fist lashing at the earth. And there, hidden by curtains of dirty smoke at the edge of the crater, waited a transport. Old and decrepit-looking, for sure, striated with rusty lesions and labelled, bewilderingly, 'TEQO' in patchy glopaint, it was sleekly built nonetheless. If the thieves could reach it they would escape beyond even the hunter's ability to pursue.

Fighting nascent anxiety, digging talons into the buckled metal of his perch, the hunter howled into the shadows and leapt again. His leaps carried him in graceful arcs from roost to roost, gripping verticals and platforms for instants before relaunching, clawing his way along the spires and toppled towers of the rained craft. For a moment the storm intensified, thick flurries masking the prey's clumsy progress, and the hunter worked his way through the squall with reckless abandon: body flattened, gracile armour cutting the air, jump pack spluttering. When at last the whiteout cleared he sought a vantage point, racing along the promontory of a collapsed sensor turret, and glared out towards the transport.

They were almost there. Clambering down from the edge of the prow, the thieves stood scant metres from their salvation, lifting their loot-stretcher with renewed vigour. The hunchbacked leader outpaced the two carriers and scrambled up the crater wall, swinging himself into the waiting vehicle's cockpit to start its engine. Even through the storm the hunter could hear the machine's growl, could taste the stink of its fuel. He launched himself one final time, overexerted muscles triggering cunning devices within his armour, pumping a slick of combat-stimms into his blood. He shivered with the rush of adrenaline that followed, watching the ground streak past below: a forest of crippled decks giving way to deep, endless grey. Snow by night.

The litter-bearers reached the crater-edge and hefted their burden onto their backs, steeling themselves for the awkward climb. The first hooked a glove into the broken rock and turned, nodding at his comrade, then scowled with a grunt of surprise as something tugged at his arm...

...which was no longer there.

Blood geysered across virgin snow and the stretcher collapsed to the floor, stolen treasures tumbling across the frost. Behind the man, steam rising from leering grille-ventilator, the hunter hissed and brandished the severed arm. He relished the growing fear, exulting in the horror written across these two fools' faces. The merest shrug and the first's heart was punctured, ribs incised like butter. The other ran, blindly, stupidly, away from the crater edge and into heavy snow, stumbling on a drift. The hunter hopped, vulture-like, onto his back, claws plucking at his flesh, and placed a taloned foot upon his head.

There was something pleasantly percussive in the crackling that followed.

Above him, beyond the caldera of the crash site, the transport pulled away. The hunter tensed to pursue — the stimm boiling in his blood, crying out for more carnage, more terminal justice for the insult of the theft — but paused to reconsider. The haul of stolen goods had been reclaimed — scattered across the snow between its bearers' bodies — and he could not simply leave it where it lay on the flimsy promise of one last kill.

Breathing heavily, trying his best to regain calmness in spite of the stimm, he turned to the discarded loot and began to search. The claws of his fists — sabre-like protrusions that dripped whorls of vibrant scarlet across the snow — retracted into patterned grooves with a silken rasp, pulling back to reveal gloved fingers beneath. On his knees, flicking aside the crumpled items of useless technology that had caught the thieves' eyes, he rummaged first in the weapons crates, fingering ornate bolters and shell clips, tapping at grenades, scavenging through packaging with increasing frustration. His search intensified: overturning crates, emptying priceless baubles and ancient technologies across the ice, breath accelerating with each moment.

The suspicion stole over him by degrees — a protracted wave of horror and shame — and he suppressed it over and over, pushing it down into his guts.

He couldn't fool himself forever.

'No!' he roared, claws snickering from their sockets like lightning, slicing through crates and gunmetal barrels, weaving a flickering storm across snow and earth. 'It's not here! It's not here.'

The quickening effects of the stimm lasted half an hour, and when his rages and screams were all spent, when the bodies of the men he'd killed could be diced no further, when his claws steamed with bloody red vapour, when finally his mind cleared of the drughaze and began — at last — to awaken fully, only then did he think of the thieves' leader. The one that he had allowed to escape. The hunchback.

Or perhaps not a hunchback at all. Perhaps a man carrying a package securely beneath his furs, strapped across his broad shoulders.

Cheated, the hunter slumped to the snow and breathed icy air. Recollections filtered into him, delayed consciousness worked its bitter way through the dying embers of the rage, and piece by piece he accumulated the fragments of who he was. This second stirring, this fattening package of personality and past, stole over him in quiet degrees: a far more human awakening than the first.

His name was Zso Sahaal, the Talonmaster, the heir to the Corona Nox, and he had rescinded his humanity a long time before.

Memories assailed him: fragmentary and nonsensical. He gripped them as they rushed by, struggling to remember.

There had been a death.

That was how it began: an assassination and a power vacuum.

He remembered the promise that had been made to him: the legacy he was granted, the sacred vows he swore. He'd accepted a holy duty without hesitation, and at the moment of his ascension had stretched out a willing hand to receive it.

The Corona Nox had been his. Briefly.

There had been complications. There had been interventions. Alien interventions.

He remembered, through the riot of chattering bolters and screaming voices, in the rush of a psychic storm, the xenos. He remembered the pain and the confusion. He remembered the burning enemy, that brittle fiend, bright helm arched and antlered, staff banishing every shadow to extinction.

He remembered fleeing. He remembered the trap. He remembered the fissure in the fabric of nothing, sucking him down, swallowing him whole.

He had been caged within a timeless prison, and without hope of escape he had emptied his mind and slept. He'd stumbled through endless dreams, grappled with nightmares, and—

—and had awoken to discover the Corona gone.

The leader, yes. The so-called hunchback. He had taken it.

An hour later, Zso Sahaal stood at the edge of the wreckage and regarded his vessel, the Umbrea Insidior, with a wistful eye.

The last time he'd admired her exterior had been from the cramped cockpit of a shuttle, rising towards her from the surface of Tsagualsa, on the eve of his final mission. Even then, gnawed at by impatience, he'd paused to admire her savage form. Artfully decorated in banks of ebony and blue, picked-through with bronze, her towers and minarets endowed upon her an almost ornate fragility.

It was, of course, an illusion.

Vulture-beaked and weapon-pocked, her generariums hulked from her stern like the head of a mallet, cannons decorating the hammer's grip with all the organic tenacity of barnacles upon a whale. Here and there her changing fortunes were transcribed in scars and healed abrasions, all the arts of the Adeptus Mechanicus focused upon improvement, strength, power. More obvious still were the revisions to her structure made by her latest masters: blades and icons arching from her pitted hull, intricate designs dappling her iron snout, stylised arcs of gauss lightning painted in harsh whorls across the darkness of her intricate surfaces.

She had been a strike cruiser, once. Fast and vicious, a fitting chariot for the mission he'd boarded her to fulfil. A vessel worthy of his captaincy.

And now?

Now she was a broken hag. Crooked ribs slumped from fractured expanses. Crevices gaped like whip-wounds where conflicting pressures had buckled and pierced her hull. Her great spine was broken, crumpled across half a kilometre of steaming waste. Her beak had been thrust with such violence into the earth that her flanks had snapped, reactors sagging then pitching up and outwards, shearing vicious rents before detonating, their colossal energies vaporising what little substance had survived the atmosphere's passage.

Sahaal could barely imagine the calamitous impact. Were it not for the evidence of his own eyes — this pitiful thing smeared like metal paste across the ice — he would have doubted that such a vessel as the Umbrea Insidior could be brought so low.

Oh, how the mighty are fallen... Where had he heard that before?

It hardly mattered, now. There were more important things to consider. Priorities.

Pursuits.

There were no other survivors — of that he was certain. His inspection of the central corridors revealed nothing but dry bones and ancient fabrics: all that remained of the vassals that had crewed this once-proud ship. Now all as dead as she, and for a good deal longer. Sifting through storerooms, kicking aside mournful skulls, Sahaal began to wonder just how long had passed since his imprisonment began. Had his servants withered and grown old as he slept, as ageless as gold? Had they fallen to dust and ash around him, mayflies around a statue, or had they perhaps taken their own lives, forgoing the tedium of confinement for a swift, bloody release?

Again, he diverted his wondering mind. There would be time for speculation later, once his prize was reclaimed.

In the end his salvage was little better than had been the thieves'. Into a crate he upended as many ammunition clips as he could find, laying an ornate bolter reverentially on top. The looters had missed it when they'd raided the shattered remains of the armoury, never thinking to prise away the mangled sides of the strongbox at the armoury's core, where he had placed it.

It was named Mordax Tenebrae — the Dark's Bite. It had been hand crafted on Nostramo Quintus and was, in any material sense, priceless. As Sahaal ran an eye across its familiar stock, its elaborately decorated chambers and skull-mouthed barrel, he found himself wishing that they had found it, that they'd stolen it in exchange for the one item that he could not abide to lose — the very item that had been taken.

It was an impressive weapon, certainly, and he'd maintained it with the respect its magnificence demanded. It had been a gift from his master, and such was his devotion that had it been a knife or a book or a lump of rock, he would have cherished it with an equal fervour. But still, but still...

Like any gun, like any crude projectile-vomiting apparatus, he thought it a clumsy tool: a thing of noise and desperation, of smoke and flame. For all its complexity, for all the care and artistry lavished upon it, it would never rival the purity of a blade.

It would never be as vital to him as the Corona Nox.

Into the crate it went, and along with a scattering of what random munitions and grenades he could find, and a rack of fuelcells for his armour, he took just one last item: a heavy rectangular package, stolen from the wreck's remaining generarium, glowing with a pestilent green tinge. This he loaded carefully between layers of foam, acknowledging that sometimes the precision of a blade would never be enough.

The crate hissed as he depressed its sealing rune, and as he gripped its iron handle he reflected that in another time such an ignoble thing as carrying luggage would have been unthinkable, the remit of the numberless slaves that tended to his every desire.

How the mighty are fallen... A simple phrase, whispering through his mind for a second time, like the ghost of an echo. He realised with a start that it was his master's voice he'd remembered, and with crystal clarity recalled the time, the circumstance, the sentiment.

It had been on Tsagualsa. On Tsagualsa, before the killer came. Gazing into the night, brows beetling together, ancient eyes clouded, Sahaal's lord had turned to him and smiled, and said those words, and in his voice Sahaal could taste his disposition.

Troubled. Bitter. Betrayed. Haunted.

'We shall be mighty yet,' Sahaal promised, words lost to the driving snow, fist clenched against his heart.

Lifting the crate to his side, he set his sights upon the faint shadows of the transporter's tracks, took one last glance at the Umbrea Insidior, and leapt into the night.

Mita Ashyn

It was less an awakening than a rebirth.

Always it was like this, after the trance. Always she allowed the subtle skeins of perception and concept to break free from her focus, shifting her mind state from some inner vantage to the mundane outer realities, the province of conventional sense and thought.

She returned to her corporeal self like an eagle resuming its eyrie, breathing honeyed incense and enjoying the slow trickle of physical sensation. It felt like blood flowing through starved arteries.

In the Scholastia Psykana she'd learnt to call this the pater donum: the brief flush of warmth and contentment that followed a scrying trance, like a reward from the Emperor's own hand. She allowed it to work its way along each limb, curling her toes and arching her back.

Relish it, the adept-tutors had taught. Enjoy it whilst it lasts. It was, after all, the single facet of telepathy that justified the term ''gift'' where all others equated more accurately to the symptoms of a curse.

The pater donum would not last. It would be gone in an instant, and at that unhappy moment all the fierce memories of the trance would crash inwards to drown her.

She opened her eyes, focused on the single guttering candle at the centre of the scrying-ring, and allowed the sludge of recollection to break through.

Her first thought was this:

Something has fallen from heaven.

The meditation cell was a simple affair.

Four rockcrete walls arched overhead, sloping together to form a crude dome with a needle of bronze at its core: a conduction point for the astral body. Gone were the scriptures picked out in gold and opal across each wall, gone were the stylised star charts and mantras patterning the seer-dome, gone were the great twisting shelves of chittering incense drones. Such comforts she'd left behind on the fortress-world Safaur-Inquis, and this spartan cube was as far removed from the decadence she'd come to expect as it could be. She supposed she should be grateful for anything at all, given the indifference her new master had showed her, but still... there were limits.

A withered servitor — once human, long since lobotomised, dissected, infested with logic engines and clattering components — poked a stunted limb against her shoulder, its one rheumy eye fluttering spastically. It tried to talk, but the rune-etched staples through its lips and jaw allowed little more than a moist clucking, a long strand of drool wobbling from its chin.

On Safaur, her trance-awakenings had been tended by gende servants: smooth-skinned subordinates with tongues neady removed and ownership studs across each eye, hurrying to mop her sweat and massage her shoulders, lovingly recording on scented parchment whatever insights the meditation bestowed. On Safaur her trance-suite flocked with locust-like automata: emeralds for eyes and rubies for jaws, coloured streamers of psychoactive pheromones falling like musk from their tails. On Safaur a dozen cogitators existed solely to interpret her visions. On Safaur the majesty of her quarters was matched only by the view from her central garret, and between assignments she spent hours gazing across the acid shores of the sulphur seas. On the Inquisitorial fortress-world of Safaur-Inquis, her masters wielded their influence with artistry and opulence.

Her present circumstance was therefore somewhat galling.

Here, a one-armed man/machine with a techstylus and a snot-clogged nose was the best the governor's chamberlain could provide. It poked her again, marking her naked skin with a moronic stripe of ink before leaning away, eye rolling. Above it a faulty servodrone corkscrewed erratically across the ceiling, oozing incense. It bashed against the wall with depressing regularity, and she found herself unconsciously counting along — tap-tap-tap — like the beating of a plastic heart.

Anything to distract her from the memories.

But no, the warm pleasure of the pater donum had passed, the details of this dull little chamber had ceased to offer any but the most rudimentary of diversions, and the growing pressure behind her eyes couldn't be contained indefinitely. Sighing, she pulled a simple robe across her shoulders, clenched her jaw, snuffed out the candle and focused on the details of the trance, still burning bright in her mind.

'Record,' she commanded, waving a hand. The servitor straightened, stylus poised on the fluttering surface of an augur-slate, clucking its readiness.

'There follows the account,' she began formally, ignoring the whispering of the servitor's joints, 'of the furor arcanum undertaken in the Emperor's name on this day — date it — by I, interrogator primus of the retinue of Inquisitor Kaustus, on Imperial hive-world Equixus. In service of the most blessed Inquisition and in fealty to his Holiness the Emperor of Man, I attest upon my immortal soul to the provenance of this account, and swear upon its veracity — may my lord else strike me down.' She drew a breath, shivering at the cold. 'Blessings be upon His Throne and dominion. Ave imperator!'

She watched as the servitor scrawled the dedication with a mechanical twitch, scrolling the data-slate onto a clean line. She took a moment to compose herself, pursed her lips, then continued.

'For the third time — refer to prior reports — the trance began with the sensation of... altitude.' She closed her eyes and remembered the cold, the dizzying sensation of an abyssal nothingness gaping on every side, ice forming on her skin. She immersed herself in the memory and continued to speak, applying the recall techniques she'd been taught since an early age. 'I... I felt as though I was standing at a great height,' she said, 'and all around me the ground rushed away like the sides of a mountain. Except... a mountain made of metal. I couldn't see anything — there was too much snow — but I knew that if I stepped too far in any direction I'd fall. I'd fall and never stop falling, all the way down to a... a deep darkness, where no light ever shines. I couldn't see it, but... I knew it was there. I could feel it.

'There was a moment of nausea — though...' She half smiled, childishly proud, '... though today, for the first time, I did not vomit. It seemed to me, then, that something was drawing near, pushing through the snow, and though I was scared I stood my ground...' She chewed a lip, brows dipping. 'Perhaps I feared the drop more than I feared the approaching presence, I... I don't know. During previous trances I've awoken at this point and my efforts to divine further details have been frustrated. Today I... persisted. I'm certain I caught a glimpse of the... the presence in the snow, which has eluded me until now.

'It seemed to be myself.'

She glanced up, aware of how ridiculous the sentiment sounded. If the servitor was even capable of such judgement it gave no indication of it, awaiting her next words with the same dumb focus as before. She tried to relax, reminding herself that the interpretations of the furor arcanum were never straightforward, and that the libraries of the Scholastia Psykana were filled with validated predictions that had arisen from the most preposterous of trance-visions.

Still she hesitated, disturbed by the vividness of the dream.

'It was me, but... but I looked different. My hair was cut short and I wore rags, and... there was blood on my face. One of... oh, Throne... one of my arms was gone. Bleeding like a fountain... I was trying to say something but the wind was too strong and I... I couldn't hear, and that's when I saw... I...

'I was being carried. In the air, like... flying. I tried to see what was holding me but it was covered by the snow and there was... there was a shadow over its face.'

She was vaguely aware of a tear slipping down her cheek, and distantly — surreally — wondered why it was there. What did it mean?

The words came in a jumble now, refusing to stop, and she felt herself caught up in the same fearful horror as during the trance itself, tumbling and screaming and freezing, all at once.

'I looked into it... the shadow, I mean... and it was like I was falling, straight through the snow towards the ground, and... and something was chasing me, burning me from behind my eyes... Emperor preserve me, it was a pregnant hag — the size of a city — rushing down from the stars... a-and... and she hit the snow and... ohhh... her bones broke and her belly split and...

'...and darkness crawled out from her womb.'

She forced open her eyes long enough to check that the servitor had recorded every word. It watched her without comment or movement, fully prepared to wait forever for her next command.

Sighing, Interrogator Mita Ashyn of the Ordo Xenos allowed herself the indulgence of slipping into a deep, exhausted faint.

'Ah, interrogator.'

'My lord.' Mita bowed formally, keeping her eyes lowered. She hadn't yet grown accustomed to her new master's idiosyncrasies, but had learned quickly that his legendary temper was deployed far more readily amongst those who failed to show the proper obeisance. Given that he insisted upon wearing a mirror-helm with only the narrowest of eyeslits, it was perhaps unfortunate that any interested glance towards his surreal headgear was mistaken for disrespect, which of course invited the full force of his wrath.

Inquisitor Kaustus was not a man to cross lightly.

Mita considered herself relatively safe, just as long as she occupied her view with the tails of his chequered robes and the heavy soles of his armoured feet, rather than his feather-mantled shoulders and reflective mask.

'Stop that,' he snapped, proving her wrong, his voice curiously soft for such an imposing figure. 'I won't have my acolytes bowing and scraping like common peasants. I'm your master, girl, not your Emperor.'

'Apologies, my lord.' She straightened and adjusted her gaze vertically, oozing penitence. Perhaps chest height would be more appropriate.

Behind her, a couple of the innumerable cowled figures that comprised Kaustus's retinue sniggered lightly, amused at her mistake. She forced down the overwhelming desire to break their heads and forced herself to calm. As the newest member of the entourage she'd quickly learned that rank counted for exactly nothing: technically her command was second only to the inquisitor's, but it seemed respect was earned — not demanded — amongst this colourful crowd. As long as Kaustus continued to humiliate her in front of them their respect would continue to be in short supply.

'I've read the account of your vision,' the inquisitor said, voice dripping scorn, waving a spindly datapad across her view. 'You fainted.'

'It was... unusually vivid, my lord.'

'I don't care how vivid it was, girl. I'll not tolerate my servants passing out at the drop of hat.'

'It won't happen again, my lord.'

'No. It will not.' The datapad dipped upwards — the inquisitor's gaze roving across its spidery text. 'Your account makes for... interesting reading,' he said. 'What does it all mean?'

'I don't know, my lord. There are no cogitators here to deciph—'

'I didn't ask what some Emperor-damned machine would make of it, girl! I asked what you think.'

She swallowed, resisting the urge to meet his gaze. Here, in the splendour of his guest suite at the heart of the governor's palace, he was as terrible and magnificent a figure as the legends made claim.

'Well?'

'I... I think something is coming, my lord. Coming here, I mean.'

'"Something". Is that the best you can do?'

She bristled, fists clenching at her sides, struggling to keep the bitterness from her voice. 'Something from the stars, then. Something massive. S-something dark.'

For a moment there was silence. Dust motes circulated through the hard beam of a hovering illuminator, and at the periphery of her vision Mita could see the retinue shuffling its collective feet. Had her words struck a chord?

Kaustus shattered both the silence and her hopes with one deft exclamation.

'Emperor's blood!' he boomed, voice heavy with sarcasm, 'such detail! How did I ever cope without a witch at my side?'

Predictably the room exploded, acolytes and cowled disciples venting their sycophantic amusement in gales of laughter. Willing herself not to blush — unsuccessfully — Mita supposed she couldn't blame them. In shared cruelty lay acceptance, a bitter lesson she'd been slow to grasp.

For an instant she found herself hating them. Hating him, even, reviling her own master like some undisciplined child... But such thoughts were the gatestones at the head of a dangerous path, and her entire life had been spent studying to ward off such heretical temptations. She willed herself to relax, bore the humiliation with good grace—

—and dug her fingernails so far into the flesh of her palms that blood oozed between her knuckles.

'Enough.'

Kaustus silenced the laughter, tossing aside the data-pad like some broken toy, its ability to entertain spent. An abrupt silence gripped the room and he watched the crowd with narrowed eyes, colossal shoulders squared.

'A mission.'

To Mita, bathed unwillingly in a tumult of psychic emissions, the phrase was like an icy wind. She tasted the hungry anticipation of the retinue, all forced amusements forgotten, minds focused and sharp. She gave them their dues: fools they might be, but they were obedient with it.

'Investigation and salvage.' Kaustus cocked his head towards his staff, barking commands. 'Three teams, three transports. Division pattern delta. Now.'

The entourage divided like a machine, three groups forming in short order. Without the benefit of individual familiarity, Mita could nonetheless detect the more obvious distributions of resource: in each group there hulked the cowled form of a combat servitor, in each a medic fussed with triage apparatus and checked chemical proboscis, in each a hooded priest stepped from figure to figure, administering blessings and prayers.

Kaustus had been collecting disciples his entire life, amassing a crew to shame even the most luminary of fellow inquisitors. With a single command the capabilities and specialisms of the whole had been spliced evenly and instantly, without comment or question or flaw. Even to Mita, still smarting from their scorn, it was a display of impressive efficiency.

She struck what she hoped was an authoritative pose — uncomfortably aware that she alone had failed to fall in. If Kaustus had expected her involvement he gave no sign of it, nodding briskly at each group.

'We rendezvous at gate Epsilon-Six in three hours,' he barked. 'Cold-weather gear, night-sight, fully armed. Dismissed!'

The retinue filed from the suite without a word, and Mita reflected that for all their variety, for all the many characters and histories contained within the group, they operated with parade-ground efficiency to match even the most elite of the Imperial guard's storm troopers.

She realised with a start that she was the last to leave, and that Kaustus was staring at her, gloved fingers toying elegantly with the cruciform ''I'' medallion around his neck. 'Interrogator,' he said, features unreadable. 'You appear to still be here...'

'My lord,' she swallowed, hunting for a diplomatic method of delivering her enquiries, settling eventually for a lame: 'What are we to investigate?'

The anticipated rebuke for her insolence never came. She imagined the man's lips curling behind the mask: the grin of a cat entertained by its struggling prey.

'That's just it, interrogator,' he cooed. 'You already know.'

She frowned. 'My lord?'

'How did you put it? "Something from the heavens... Something massive... Something dark"?'

'I... I'm sorry, my lord, I don't u—'

'You were right. Albeit somewhat late.'

'Late?'

'A vessel — a large vessel — crash-landed in the ice wastes two hours ago. Given that we were already here, it would seem remiss to not aid in the investigation.'

'But... but...'

'It's not coming, interrogator. It's already arrived. Dismissed.'

She marched out in an unthinking haze, and as she stamped towards her dingy cell to prepare, an ugly foreboding twisted in her guts. Her waking revelation returned to her and she winced against the pain.

Something has fallen from heaven.

Through night-vision binox — baroque coils of cabling and lenses enveloping her eyes like a hungry kiss — the hive was a flaming steeple.

Peering over her shoulder, shivering despite thick furs, Mita regarded the city-world as the convoy left it behind, swallowed by the horizon like a melting stalagmite. That there were larger hives on worlds less remote couldn't detract from its magnificence: the city's vastness snagged at her eyes, sucking on her attention. Two hundred million souls, crushed together like termites, eking out their blind lives in the belly of a spine-tipped beast.

Most would never see the sky.

It punctured the air like a gnarled knuckle. Cloud-clad and encased in frost, it was an inverted icicle, its uneven surfaces eroded by time and weather, pitted by industry and accented by turrets and spires. Where once the tempests of Equixus had raged undisturbed, now they found themselves incised, gashed apart by this upstart architecture. It drew a thick blood of lightning, auroras boiling into the night, and the splendour of its crackling crown strobe-lit the bleak wastes for kilometres around.

On this, the planet's unlit face — tumbling in perfect synchronicity with the orbital year — it was always dark, and always cold. Against the gloom, factories belched fiery waste and loading bays vented nebulae of ionic pollution. From the upper tiers, above the drudgery of plebeian life, windows bled galaxies of spilled light. In Mita's eyes, with her binox devouring every luminous pinprick, the hive stood against the darkness like a monolith-god, an effigy thick with fire.

More pronounced still was the brightness in the chambers of her mind: in those unseen tendrils of psychic thought that swarmed about her like the arms of an anemone, she could taste the life of the city. Two hundred million souls, each one a guttering candle of psychic light. Each one as fragile as it was bright.

She turned away, briefly dazzled, and focused instead upon the small convoy. There were four transports — converted Salamanders with widened tracks and pintle flashlights — racing across the ice at an alarming speed. Three contained the Inquisitorial retinue — assorted cloaks fluttering as their mass allowed — whilst in the lead vehicle a squad of the local lawmen, the Preafec-tus Vindictaire, set their helmeted heads against the wind and glared back towards the others, no doubt deriding the interference of outsiders. Officially the Preafectus was an independent body, administrated by the galaxy-spanning Adeptus Arbites, but a certain amount of diplomatic compromise to Imperial officials was customary. Mita suspected that the inquisitor's involvement had been far from sanctioned by the lawmen, though it would be a brave man indeed who denied an offer of assistance from Kaustus.

The man himself shared her portion of the rear vehicle, gazing out from a raised gantry with face and mind equally as shrouded. The Inquisition trained its operatives to shield their minds from psykers with enviable aplomb, and where the other members of the retinue blazed in her sixth sense like lanterns, his radiance was shuttered and barred. He stood with arms crossed, as unperturbed by the cold as if still within his suite, and only his fingers — kneading together — belied the impression that he was a statue: some decorous idol draped in fine cloth. She realised without surprise that she still knew all but nothing about him. In the short time she'd spent in his service the one obvious conclusion she'd drawn was this: The legends were wrong.

Inquisitor Kaustus came complete with a reputation as glowing as the nocturnal hive at his back, and exploited it shrewdly. That he had undertaken great deeds, that he had crushed alien heresies throughout the Ultima Segmentum, she did not doubt. But that he had done so with nobility and honour — with heroism, no less, as the myths claimed — was harder to digest. Ruthlessness and heroism did not, in her experience, sit well together.

Mita had begun her tenure as an Inquisitorial explicator direct from the Scholastia Psykana on Escastel Sanctus. Selected by her masters, deemed strong enough to resist corruption without recourse to the crippling Soul Binding ceremony required of lesser psykers, she remembered the shadowy recruitment rituals with uncomfortable clarity. Naked and hairless, the young chosen had shivered in subterranean caverns, servitors gliding amongst them, testing, prodding, twitching. She remembered the shame, mingled with secret relief, as one by one the other youths were borne away by the vapid machines, selected from afar by their new masters. They would be scattered amongst the Munitorum offices, she knew, or perhaps deployed by the Administratum, or even — so the whispers went — inducted into the Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes.

No one had warned her there was a fourth possibility.

She was claimed by the Ordo Xenos of the Emperor's divine Inquisition: that most clandestine of societies. She found herself gobbled whole by an organisation with unlimited authority, tasked to stalk the shadows of the Imperium and keep it strong, pure, and holy. Drugged and hooded, she was initiated into a world of secrecy and paranoia at the age of twelve.

At the age of twenty-five she left the fortress-world of Safaur-Inquis to join the retinue of the Inquisitor Petrai Levoix — blessed be her name — and for six years she was... content.

In that time she witnessed the scouring of the necron'tyr megaliths on Parson's Moon. She took a hand in the shattering of the Waaagh-Shalkaz when she overcame the warlord's puppet-wyrds. She bested the primacii magi of a genestealer insurrection in the Marquand Straits, and broke the mind of the Hruddite Demagogue of the Pleanar campaign. She earned the rank of interrogator at the age of thirty and, in the crucible of the Ylir uprisings, earned a citation from the Congresium Xenos for capturing the song-sword of a slain eldar warlock.

She was making a difference. She was the inquisitor's right hand. She sought — and earned — glory, and the accounts of her deeds ran in fluttering text-ribbons that she twined through her hair. She was somebody.

And then a week before her thirty-first birthday her mistress died — stupidly, pointlessly — in a messy crossfire on Erasula IX. And everything changed.

Abruptly she was no one. Abruptly she was less than nothing, and when all the enquiries and refutations were done she found herself reassigned, re-deployed—

—and re-subordinated.

Staring ahead into the driving snow, daring to study her new master's statuesque form in stolen glances, she wondered how long — if ever — it would take her to regain those heady heights of respect. Tasting the ebb and eddy of the retinue's thoughts around her, each one swarming with the desire to impress, to rise to the top, to be noticed, she realised with gloomy certainty that it was not going to be easy.

The crash site was as chaotic and as desolate as Mita could have imagined. To see a thing so mighty as a spacecraft so utterly ruined was a humbling sight. Already the snow settled across its fractured flukes, only the jutting paraphernalia of its lance arrays and command turrets breaking through the white sheet like the half-submerged bones of a drowned corpse.

For all that it was a mighty thing, its ancient plates and spars were nonetheless imbued with a great sadness — and a great bitterness. If the other members of the retinue shared the empathic shudder she felt as she ran a questing finger across a frosted bulkhead they gave no sign of it, but their search was conducted nonetheless with unusual restraint, like looters invading a mausoleum.

The vindictors barely exchanged a word with their uninvited assistants, clumsily picking their way towards a wound on the vessel's side, powerful torches spilling light as they entered. By contrast the retinue deployed quickly and efficiently, entering jagged orifices on three flanks. As they quested deep inside, like maggots squirming through rotten flesh, they directed terse reports via the shortwave voxcasters each wore. Kaustus received these bursts without comment, wandering across the vessel's surface, content to allow his minions to explore on his behalf.

She fidgeted in his wake, wondering whether she should have taken it upon herself to join the search. Her mind fluttered through awkward quandaries: should she await his command or assert her own authority? Should she seek to impress him with loyalty and obedience, or would a firebrand self-initiative gain his approval? Without any inkling of his temperament or tastes, such actions could easily dictate her success or failure as his highest ranking servant.

Unable to skim his thoughts, denied the view of his facial expressions, she nonetheless had a fair idea that she'd singularly failed in her attempts to impress him thus far.

'Are there survivors?' he asked, fingers kneading together.

'My lord?'

He sighed, hot vapour curling from the dimpled breathing slats of his mask. 'Interrogator, I dislike being answered with questions.'

'But, my lord, I—'

'I was assured by the ordo that your skills would prove invaluable. Are you now suggesting they were incorrect?' He spoke slowly and loudly, voice thick with condescension, and Mita struggled to control her rising hackles.

'N-no my lord, but—'

'Excellent. Then the time has come for you to show me you're here for a reason, don't you think?'

She tried to form an intelligent response, but as ever the options each seemed as lame as each other. She sighed, nodding in defeat. 'Yes.'

'So? Are there any survivors?'

Forcing herself to calm, she closed her eyes to the glowing traceries of the binox view and unfolded her mind, allowing it to seep into the metal of the craft like acid through stone. Immersed in the Empyrean, she tasted the ship's secrets, she learned its ancient name, she swarmed in its chambers, and she drank its flavours.

She finally stopped screaming when the inquisitor slapped her, hard, across the cheek.

Zso Sahaal

Zso Sahaal leaned out from his sheltered alcove and drew hungry eyes across the structural anarchy around him.

He'd warmed to his new environment quickly — a predator entering fertile hunting grounds — and couldn't resist a secret smile, relishing the darkness. This chequerboard of shadows, this ferrous jungle, this cavity-filled mountain: here he was indomitable.

Unable to pause, fighting urgency and excitement, he quit his nook and bounded across a plungeshaft, dodging chains and cables: a shadow moving through shadows. Rising across vertical gantries, claw-over-claw, he pushed off with his hooked feet to hop between silent elevators, hanging like gibbeted bodies. Voices filtered from passages to either side and he paused, mimicking the ragged fabric of the wall. In a world of such haphazard architecture one more uneven shape, midnight-coloured and indistinct, was unlikely to draw attention. He unsheathed a claw, shivering at its silky emergence, and waited, every muscle tensed.

Thus poised, with every sense racing and alert, his mind found itself free to wander. It seeped into his memory like oil into a sponge, musing upon how he had found himself here: stalking this ancient labyrinth like a panther in the night.

The previous day, leaving the Umbrea Insidior countless kilometres behind him, he had watched the city appear by degrees on the horizon. For all its enormity he hadn't paused to admire it, or even to catch his breath — bounding ever onwards, tracing what faint evidence of the thief s passing remained.

At one point a phalanx of vehicles streaked nearby, engines broadcasting their approach long before the snow-haze gave them up. Cautious of confrontation, Sahaal merely pushed himself into the snow and watched them pass, ebony eyes tracking them through scarlet eyeslits. He assumed they must be heading for the crash site, and wondered vaguely what manner of personnel had been dispatched, and by whom. He decided eventually that he didn't care: there were a host of such minor questions to be answered, but nothing must divert him from the Corona.

He'd hastened towards the city, finally losing what vestiges of the thief s tracks remained. Staving off anxiety, he told himself the tracks no longer mattered: the scum's destination could hardly be doubted.

The city was, simply, vast.

At its uncertain base, where scarred ridges of stone and snow segued with serried ranks of ferrocrete and steel, he'd come to a deep fissure in the earth. Into the cavity iron foundations coiled down into the dark like the rusted roots of a titanic tree, colonised on every expanse by the grinding structures of industry. The rent billowed its fumes like the breath of a devil, a toothless mouth into the scarred ground.

Above it, where the frosted rock sprouted the lowest towers and tiers like mould, a multitude of heavy-doored gates had greeted his eyes: loading bays and vehicle access points, a hundred and one ways to cross from the arctic waste to the cloying darkness within. And every last one was closed, sealed against the cold.

Sahaal had considered his options. That he must enter the hive was without question, but where to begin? Where to hunt the thief? On the cusp of this vast edifice, hunkering amongst the pipes and cogs of its dermis, he found himself assailed by hopelessness. To find one man within all this... He might as well search a desert for a single grain of sand, or a galaxy for a single star.

But, no. No, he could not allow himself the luxury of doubt. He must be focused. He must be driven.

He must be ruthless.

He'd slipped into the foundation-crevice like a knife between ribs, swallowed by the dark.

And now, a day later — a day of exploring, of haunting the wastes below the city itself, of stalking this endless parade of corridors and tunnels and pits — was he any closer to his prize?

No.

There was no logic to this underhive realm. Where above tiers crested tiers, joined by tapestry-strewn stairwells and columns of elevators, flanked by devotional statues and preachers' pulpits, here there was madness.

Ancient stairways led to nowhere. Tunnels twisted through knotted girders and plastic waste, collecting chemical sludge. Visceral cables spewed from haphazard partitions, coiling away ever upwards into the city. Collapsed tunnels were rebored or circumvented, uphive-sluices opened to vomit acid upon duct-strewn channels, and elevator shafts full of snowmelt rippled and splashed where slime-scaled things coiled in the deep. The weight of the hive settled across pillars and posts like an ever-present promise, like a clock counting out the hours until the fall of the sky.

And the people... Cowering in ghettos around scarce resources, these were the hopeless, the useless, the dispossessed. Divided amongst the petty empires of criminal gangs, scavenging in the dark to feast on fungus and beetle-meat — these were not people. They were animals. Rats.

In that first day, as he'd slipped through the under-city's heart like a wraith, Sahaal had felt himself sickened. If this was the reward for devotion to the Emperor, he had chosen his side shrewdly.

He returned his mind to the present, focusing all his attention upon the step-step-step of his imminently-arriving prey, and unclenched his right hand. At its tip the gauntlet's hooked claws flexed, mirroring the internal movement: a second set of fingers, power-bladed and bloody-red, slaved to the movements of the first. These too had been a gift from his master, whose generosity was as unpredictable and spectacular as his moods. Sahaal had received them as gratefully as he had his bolter, but had wielded them with far greater relish: finding in them weapons worthy of the precision and purity he craved.

He had named them the Unguis Raptus — the Raptor's claws — and in so doing had coined the name of his command company. Before even the Great War his Raptors became justly feared, and in the name of first the Emperor, and then his master alone, they had brought swift death from above to their foes.

If his master had known where the gauntlets were constructed, or by whom, he had never revealed it. They were as much a part of Sahaal now as were his eyes or his tongue.

Or his hate.

Two men exited the tunnel beside him. Dressed in jackets and ferro-salvage pads, they spoke softly and trod with the nervous gait of lifelong underhivers. In these troglodytic caverns caution was as natural as breathing.

It did them little good.

The first was dead before his brain could even register a threat, twin skewers punching out of shadow and into his face, slipping like icicles through the pulp of his eyes. Sahaal shook away the corpse like waste from a shovel, sliding from his alcove to reveal himself to the second. Slowly. Silently.

The memory of his master's voice, leading his Legion in lecture-prayer, rustled like pouring sand, flooding his mind:

'Show them what you can do,' it trilled, as soft and cold as dead flesh. 'Steal their hope, like a shadow steals the light. Then show them what you are. The tool never changes, my sons. The weapon is always the same. Fear. Fear is the weapon.'

In the corridor, standing in the bloody mess of his fallen friend, the second man looked into the face of a nightmare and falteringly, chokingly, began to scream.

'I have questions,' Sahaal said, reaching out for him.

The man knew nothing, of course. None of them did.

By the end of the second day there had been twelve. Seven men, four women, one child.

It never ceased to amaze Sahaal how varied were their responses. Some — most — had screamed from the outset. When he came upon them, when he flexed his claws and hissed, when he worked their terror like an artist with a brush, smothering gouache horror on subtle blends of oil-smear dread, in those incandescent moments his heart soared with the righteousness of his work, and they threw back their little heads and — mostly — they screamed.

Some, though, were silent. Staring with mute animal-shock, dark eyes bulging, lips twitching, faces bright. In those cases Sahaal took them in his claws and carried them away, slipping down through layers of debris to secret, sheltered places where they could recover their voices at leisure.

Then the screaming could begin.

And then he could ask his questions.

One of the women — deluded, perhaps — dropped to her knees and began to pray, some mumbled litany to the Emperor. Angered by her piety, Sahaal sliced away her fingers one by one, enjoying the change in her demeanour. Holy fools, it would seem, could scream as well as sing.

One of the men tried to fight him. Briefly.

The child... the child had cried for his mother. He'd screamed and blubbed and wailed, though when Sahaal leaned down to fix him with a helmed gaze the tears stopped abruptly, surprising him, and the youth's hand flickered with the bright shape of a switchblade, lunging from below. It seemed that innocence had little business in the underhive.

(The blade had snapped. So had Sahaal's patience.)

And yes, now perhaps he could reflect upon the responses to his work. He could skulk here in the ruins of this derelict factory, on the cusp of a deserted settlement, its floors long since collapsed into the abyss, and consider his palette of fear like a painter scheming to mix new colours.

But always, always such distractions were tempered by hate, by focused rage, and by the spectral possibility of failure.

What, he asked himself, had he learnt from his murderous forays? What had he discovered from all his many questions, all his many descriptions?

Nothing. Nothing of the Corona Nox, at least.

He'd gone to pains to illustrate the spiral electoo sported by his quarry — carving it lovingly on each victim's skin — but not one had recognised it. He'd described the thieves' shaggy furs, their crude goggles, even the unknown word — TEQO — daubed on their transport, though it was familiar to none. Sahaal did not for a moment consider that his victims might have been withholding: one by one their defences cracked, their sanity shattered, but their ignorance remained intact.

No, he'd learned nothing of the Corona. His revelation had concerned something entirely less pleasing.

Since awaking on this nocturnal world something had eaten at him, gnawing at his psyche. When he took his twelfth victim — a bearded man with copper fletches across his brows and rags draping his wiry form — Sahaal's curiosity had finally overcome him. He'd gritted his teeth, hooked one elegant claw into the wretch's arm, played the bladed edge along the cusp of exposed bone, and asked the question that haunted him.

'What year is this?'

Despite the pain, despite even the terror that had gripped him since first he was attacked, the man had paused with a look of almost comical incredulity.

'W-w-what?'

'The year!' he roared, rippling the waters of the sludge-lake to which he'd brought his captive. He raised the claws of his gauntlet above the man's groin, poised to clench. It was a crude form of threat, but he had to know. 'What year, worm!'

'Nine-eight-six!' the man wailed, all thoughts of bemusement obliterated. 'Nine-eight-six!'

Sahaal growled, absorbing this unwelcome information. An absence of six centuries was far greater than he'd feared. Adrift upon the trance in the Umbrea Insidior, he had been resolutely unable to estimate how long he had spent in silent incarceration. Time moved differently in the warp, and a day's slumber in its coiling belly could easily affect a month's passage in crude reality.

Six hundred years was beyond his most fearful approximation. In a fit of pique he began to bring down his claw, venting his anger on his captive.

And then an ugly afterthought arose, and he paused to form words in the plebeian Low Gothic tongue, so appropriately favoured by the underhive filth. 'The thirty-second millennium? Yes? Answer me!'

For a fraction of a second, the man's lips curled in a dumbfounded, confused smile.

'Wh—'

Sahaal flexed the claws.

'No! No! N-no! F-forty-first!' the words rushed out like an avalanche, jumbled and formless. 'Forty-first millennium, year nine-eight-six! Forty-first! Sweet Emperor's blood, forty-first!'

The bottom fell from Sahaal's mind.

He killed the man quickly, too distracted to even relish the moment.

He returned to the factory he'd adopted as his lair.

He scuttled in the dark and brooded. He vented his anger on the shattered masonry of the ancient building, and when the violence overcame him he peeled off one mighty shoulder-guard and began slowly, precisely, cutting grooves into the exposed flesh of his arm.

It didn't help.

One hundred centuries had passed.

It was the bodies that brought answers, finally.

He had taken them, all twelve, from where they died: dismembered and brutalised, hung high from stanchions in public places and busy roads, emptying their thickening fluids upon the debris below. This was not savagery on his part, nor some crude announcement of territory — but as vital a part of his master's doctrine as was the attack itself.

'Kill a thousand men,' the lesson had run, his master's solemn voice echoing through the warship Vastitas Vi-tris, 'and let no man bear witness. What have you achieved? Who will ever know? Who will ever fear you? Who will ever respect or obey you?

'But kill a single man, and let the world see. Hang him high. Cut him deep. Bleed him dry. And then... Disappear.

'Now. Who will ever know? Everyone. Who will ever fear you? Why, everyone! Who will ever respect you, who will ever obey you? Everyone!

'These humans, their imaginations are strong. Kill a thousand men and they will hate you. Kill a million men and they will queue to face you. But kill a single man and they will see monsters and devils in every shadow. Kill a dozen men and they will scream and wail in the night, and they shall feel not hatred, but fear.

'This is the way of obedience, my sons. They are panicky, gossiping beasts, these humans. It serves us to allow them to be so.'

On the third day, when he had crept through the ductcrawls beneath the local settlements and listened to the villagers' fearful rumours, when two separate posses had ridden out from Spitcreek with furtive eyes and crude weapons to catch the killer, when his fits and rages had exhausted him, there came cautious footfalls into his lair. He watched the invader from above, irritated that his sanctuary should be defiled by such clumsy, thoughtless steps.

The man was dressed strangely, even to Sahaal's eye, sporting a robe of white and red grids. Not some flimsy ragsheet, this, but expensively tailored and elaborately decorated, hung with gold and crystal pendants. Small cables looped delicately through the stitches at the sleeves and collar, and where his flesh showed — pallid and puffy — the wires burrowed into the man's skin, unbroken lines like capillaries. More startling still was his face — what little remained of it — with its near-total coverage by augmetic devices, steel-sheet plating and bristling, spiny sensors. Both eyes were gone, replaced in messy cavities by mismatching bionics, a thick layer of pus and infection marking their boundaries. A duct coiled over his shoulder like unruly hair, and the soft lines of his lips were broken by ragged scars, as if his mouth had once been sealed shut then broken open. Rebreather tubes writhed, hooked into sockets on his chin and neck, like train tracks bisecting his face. Dermis-circuitry patterned his throat, vanishing into the folds of his robes which, on closer inspection, concealed also the hard edges and uncertain outlines of more mechanical devices.

His movements were jerky but precise — like a grounded canary — and Sahaal judged him more machine than man. He would have remained hidden, content to let this unthinking drone remain ignorant of his presence, but for a single detail:

Brandished in one metal-knuckled hand, the man waved before him a sheet of parchment bearing a bold, ink-blotted image, catching at Sahaal's attention and sending adrenaline pounding through his body: a single unbroken spiral, dissected by a jagged stripe. The thief s electoo.

He worked his silent way down towards the intruder without pause, considering his best course of action, fighting excitement. Despite the robe and decoration, the interloper bore all the signs of being little more than some vacuous servitor, obeying whatever simple commands its master had provided. It was therefore with little sense of threat, and a great glut of hope, that Sahaal installed himself in a shadowed recess to watch.

'I know you are there,' the man said, startling him, voice as lifeless as the lens-eyes that regarded him, focused despite the dark. 'I sensed movement before even I entered this place.' The figure twitched its head. 'Your stealth is commendable. Het-het-het-het...'

It took Sahaal a moment to realise that the man's harsh chirruping was his mechanical excuse for laughter, and he bunched his muscles in the shadows, temper ignited. This was hardly the behaviour of a mere servitor.

The man squinted up at him, brows twitching around metal studs. 'I cannot see you well,' he said, lips brandishing their ghoulish smile. 'What are you?'

'I am your death,' Sahaal said, patience expiring, and pounced.

The man was heavier than he had anticipated — his mechanical portions more extensive even than they appeared — but he went down with satisfying ease. Sahaal bowled him to the floor with a single bound, claws pushing hard through flesh and cable, pinning him. The diagram fluttered from his hand, the connections of his shoulder severed.

The man did not scream.

'You will tell me what you know of the thief,' Sahaal growled, voxcaster blending his smooth syntax with dangerous, reptilian tones. 'The filth with the spiral on his skin. Who is he? Where is he?'

The man smiled. With half-metre claws pinioning him to the ground, with razor edges playing across bone and muscle, with a thick paste of blood and servo-oil soaking into his decorous robes, he smiled.

Sahaal twisted the knives.

Het-het-het-het...

Sahaal fought the urge to cut out his tongue.

'My name is Pahvulti,' the man said uninvited, shivering with amusement, eye lenses revolving. 'I think we shall be friends.'

Sahaal almost killed him then, infuriated by the scum's audacity. He jerked a claw free and lashed at his face, ripping across cables and skin. A rebreather tube snickered apart with a hiss and the lens of his left eye shattered, its sutured edges bleeding from fresh sores. Sahaal stopped short — fractionally — of a killing blow, and it required all his effort to force down the rage in his mind.

'The thief!' he bellowed. 'Or you die in pain!'

'I doubt that,' the man said, calm to the point of insanity, 'on two counts. First... I don't believe you foolish enough to kill the one person who recognises the symbol you've been slicing onto all your victims. And second, het-het-het, I don't feel pain. I regard it as an inconvenience I'm better off without.'

Sahaal all but screamed. Did the fool not know how easily he could be crushed? Did he not know what manner of man — what manner of warrior — he directed his insolence towards?

As if reading his thoughts, the worm's one remaining eye twitched across Sahaal's armour, taking in every detail of his colossal form. 'I daresay that painlessness is something to which you can relate,' he grinned. 'Space Marines are notoriously robust.'

Later, in a place so silent that every spoken word was returned to its speaker's ears in a spectrum of glassy echoes, Sahaal folded his arms and fought for calm.

The man-machine Pahvulti had been crucified. With jagged splints of debris forced between the bones of his arms and a tight cord securing his neck to the slumped pillar Sahaal had chosen as his anchor, he should by rights seem a pitiful thing: stripped naked of his robes, bound with chains and barbed cables, slashed and bleeding in a dozen places.

Alas, his situation did not appear to have dented his enthusiasm, nor silenced his laughter.

'...and at one time, het-het-het, I might have prayed to the Omnissiah,' he cackled, 'but no longer, no, no. Not Pahvulti. They tried to turn me, you see? They said the puritens had rejected my flesh. Het-het-het. Rejected! No! It made me strong! It made me wise!'

'Be silent, confound you!' Sahaal's temper was by now comprehensively frayed.

'Are you not interested, Space Marine, in how your new friend came to find you? Are you not interested in my knowledge?'

'Call me a Space Marine once more, worm, and I'll cut out your tongue and choke you on it.'

'Het-het-het, no, no... Not my tongue. Not while I know what I know.'

'The spiral electoo? Who wears it? His name!'

Het-het-het...

Sahaal hissed his anger through the grille of his helm and hooked a claw into what little meat remained of his captive's belly. It was a hopeless gesture — the man had demonstrated nothing but contempt for the notion of torture — but at the very least the moist noises of slicing helped to calm Sahaal's mood.

Never before had a mere human occupied a position of such influence over him. Pahvulti refused to divulge what he knew until Sahaal vowed to spare him, and to offer him such an oath would shatter every code Sahaal believed, tear to shreds every ounce of his dignity and sully every corner of his authority. Under other circumstances he would have laughed at the very suggestion.

Nor could he merely make, then break, the oath: Pahvulti had made it clear that he would deliver his information only from afar, well beyond Sahaal's punitive grasp.

For the twentieth time since bringing his captive to this dark, deep well, Sahaal cursed Pahvulti's name, cursed the ill fortune that had gifted him with such leverage, and cursed the warpshit filth that had stolen the Corona Nox and placed him in this situation in the first place.

Zso Sahaal was not accustomed to fear or uncertainty. His natural response to each was to grow angry, and in his increasingly violent gashes at Pahvulti's guts, some small portion of his venom was assuaged.

Until—

'Het-het-het... not that it bothers me, Space Marine, but you should be aware...' Pahvulti made a show of grinning, '...that impervious to pain I might be, but invulnerable I am not. Continue to cut me and I am eighty-seven-point-six per cent certain that I shall perish.' His remaining lens-eye twinkled. 'Just thought you should know. Het-het-het.'

He was a calculus logi, or at least had been. Over the previous hours Sahaal had been treated to the man's life story at least three times — a repetition which was not helping his mood.

Pahvulti had begun as a human savant-computer of the Adeptus Mechanicus — whose brittle thoughts had aided administrations and diplomats, tacticians and explorators all across the sector. On the day of his fiftieth birthday he was presented with the highest accolade reserved for his kind: the puritens lobotomy. This ritualised surgery removed from his scarred brain what little trace of humanity remained, amputated his subconscious, and burned away his pain.

It should have made him pure, mechanical, perfect. It should have brought him closer to his god, and sheltered his weak biology from the predations of temptation. To say that it failed would be a quite spectacular understatement.

His body rejected the implants. He awoke shriven of his pain and his dreams, but excised utterly from the obsessive faith he'd held before. He awoke a greedy, flawed bastard with the mind of a computer, and when his priest-masters ordered that he report for dismantlement, he laughed down his thrice-blessed comm-line and fled.

And now?

Now he was the self styled ''cognis mercator'' of the Equixus hive: an information broker whose lattice of influence and spymongering extended to all points. He served the gangmasters with mercenary neutrality, sold his rumours to upcity analysts, hired himself to navy officials to direct pressganging and grew fat and rich in the certain knowledge that he was too valuable, too vital, for any fool to kill.

He alone had collated information on all twelve of Sahaal's slayings. He alone noted the spiral scars cut into each corpse. He alone recognised the power, the lethality, of the killer on the loose. He alone had compiled maps and behavioural patterns, identifying the point central to each murder. He alone had found Sahaal's lair.

And he alone was bold enough to come looking for him, seeking influence and opportunity over whatever force of destruction had entered his territory.

And he alone was fortunate enough to be in a position to achieve both.

Sahaal cursed his name again, flexed his claws impotently, and prepared to cut him free.

Mita Ashyn

The knocking at her cell door, which she had been expecting, came in the evening of the third day. The cowled acolyte responsible sniggered as she read the summons he delivered.

Her master demanded an audience.

Having failed utterly to distinguish herself at the crash site of the Umbrea Insidior — its name being the only detail she remembered from her trance and subsequent blackout — she expected the summons to herald a formal discharge. The Inquisition was ruthless in defending its obscurity, and if that required ineffectual personnel to be cerebrally cleansed or, worse, culled, then so be it.

She had spent the intervening days meditating — neither scrying nor dreaming, but basking in the Emperor's light — and when the summons arrived she had prepared herself for death, or at least lobotomisation, as best she could.

Kaustus received her alone — that was the first of her surprises, she'd assumed the retinue would turn out in force to witness the spectacle of its newest member being cast aside.

'Interrogator,' Kaustus greeted her, not looking up. He sat at a simple desk in the centre of his suite, engrossed in a bundle of parchments and auspex pads, and delicately laid down his writing stylus as she dipped her head in return.

'My lord.'

The second shock, and one for which she was utterly unprepared, was that he had removed his mask. His face was unremarkable — somewhat gaunt, perhaps, bordering on the aquiline — and his hair, tied in a tall black tower that crested his head like a topknot, could hardly be described as outlandish amongst the clashing fashions of the upper hive. But it was his teeth that stood out. Two of them, at any rate.

Inquisitor Kaustus had tusks.

'Orkish,' he said, without prompt.

Mita realised she'd been staring and lowered her eyes, brows furrowing in uncertainty. He hadn't even looked up.

'For three days I stalked the bastard through the tar pits on Phyrra. We'd freed his slaves, wiped out his war-band, crippled his fleet and filled his green flesh with more lead than a target range, but the brute wouldn't give in. Warlords are like that. Proud. Stubborn.'

Mita fidgeted, wondering if this was some perverse treat the inquisitor reserved for the condemned: a story from his own lips, a glimpse of his secret features, then a bullet between the eyes. If Kaustus noted her tension, he gave little sign.

'We caught up with him on the edge of a volcano,' he continued, turning a page of parchment before him, 'and after he'd hacked his way through my men I fought that piece of xeno filth for two hours. The way I saw it, if he'd killed me he would have taken my head as a trophy.' He twanged a tusk with a gloved finger, finally looking up with a smirk. 'This seemed an appropriate measure.'

Mita wondered if she should comment. As ever, the inquisitor sent her confidence crashing around her, robbing her of any certainty. A wrong word, a misplaced facial expression: in a man as unreadable as this, such things could be disastrous.

On the other hand, if she was here to die anyway...

'I imagine, my lord,' she said carefully, 'they come in useful.'

He nodded, smiling at her boldness.

'Indeed they do. To the ork, symbols of status are vital. I've seen the vermin retreat rather than face a human with tusks greater than their own. I've seen them turn on their own lords when their enemy's fangs are taller or sharper than his. A simple thing, but so very effective.'

Mita's resignation to her fate lent her a dangerous bravery. Go outfighting, she thought.

'Though I imagine they make eating difficult.'

There was a cold, uncomfortable silence. Kaustus's eyes burnt a hole through her.

And then he began to laugh.

'It depends,' he said, when the chuckles subsided, 'what it is you're trying to eat.'

'Am I to be discharged?' Mita said, tiring of the niceties. If she was here to die she'd rather skip the preamble.

For the first time she felt as though she had Kaustus's full attention, and she met his gaze openly. He steepled his fingers.

'No,' he said, finally, 'though the idea was... considered.'

Something like relief, mixed with a perverse portion of disappointment, filtered through Mita's mind.

'You gave us the name of the vessel, interrogator,' Kaustus said, 'which is in itself a revealing detail. That you were so... affected... speaks volumes.'

'B-but I could not answer your question, my lord. I could not tell if there were survivors...'

He waved a vague hand. 'Oh, the retinue handled that. There were none.' He fiddled with the pendant around his neck. 'Such remains as they found were ancient things, long since passed beyond the Emperor's light.'

'Then... how did the ship come to arrive here?'

Kaustus worked his jaw, tusks circulating below his eyes. 'My logi have hypothesised it was lost in the warp,' he said, dismissively, 'and has only recently exited.' He fixed her with a glare, all traces of congeniality gone. 'In any case, it's beyond our remit. We are here to investigate xenophile cults, if you remember, not to ponder upon the complexities of the warp. The retinue found nothing untoward in the wreck. Let that be an end to it.'

Mita recalled the psychic terror incumbent within every joist of the vessel's structure, stabbing at her mind like fire. There was something dark to it, she knew, some echo of past horrors that clung to its hull like an aura.

Despite the discomfort she said nothing to Kaustus, aware that his newfound tolerance could end at any moment, and suppressed her internal shudder.

'I have informed the Adeptus Mechanicus of its arrival,' Kaustus grunted, returning his attention to the paperwork. 'I dare say they'll send salvage crews. It matters little.'

'Yes, my lord.' Inside, she screamed: No, my lord! Something has arrived!

'Which brings me to my point.' Kaustus lifted a parchment, narrowing his eyes. 'It seems this dreary world is fated to present me with as many distractions as it can.' He shook his head, black hair teetering above his scalp. 'I have decided to give you a commission, interrogator.'

Mita's heart stopped. 'My lord?'

'My investigation is bearing fruit. The governor has opened his records and I suspect the presence of a xenophile enclave in the midhive. I wish to concentrate my resources on locating and purging it.'

'O-of course.'

'Of course. So when I received yet another damnable request for assistance, this time from the vindictors, of all people — and after all the fuss they made when we joined their little crash site excursion — I naturally thought of you.'

Mita wasn't sure whether this was a compliment or an insult, so she nodded discreetly and stayed quiet.

'It seems their commander has a problem in the underhive. Quite what he expects me to do about it I don't know, but I'll be damned if I waste another second on the inconsequential internal affairs of this world.'

Mita had a bad feeling about where this was going. 'You'd like me to assist him in your stead...' she said, filled with gloomy resignation, inwardly appalled at the ignominy of such a mission. The underhive, warp dammit!

Kaustus regarded her with a grin, needle-like tusks bisecting his face.

'Congratulations, interrogator.'

A short while later, when the indignity of the commission was beginning to sink in, when her master had provided her with all the documents of authority that she needed, and when she was dismissed with no more than a ''that will be all'', she paused at the exit to Kaustus's suite and cleared her throat.

'Yes, interrogator?' Kaustus sighed.

'My lord, you... you said the name of the vessel had been... "revealing"...?'

'And?'

'I... I just wondered... in what way, my lord.'

He narrowed his eyes. 'Curiosity is a dangerous thing, interrogator.'

She nodded, dipping in a supplicatory half-bow, and made to leave.

'Interrogator?' His voice caught her on the threshold of the doorway.

'My lord?'

'The Umbrea Insidior disappeared from Imperial records ten thousand years ago. At the end of the Horus Heresy.'

She almost choked, astonished to even hear the name of that most ruinous of times — when fully half of the Emperor's Space Marine Legions had fallen from his light — let alone to have come so close to one of its relics. Little wonder, she realised, that she had felt such a concentration of despair and violence in its crumpled beams.

'Goodbye, interrogator.'

Cuspseal was as low within the hive as one could travel within the broadly defined ''civilised'' sectors. It dominated six full tiers, extended in five kilometres in each direction and had a population — depending upon where one chose to imagine its borders – of somewhere between six and ten million citizens. As with all such industrial loci it wasn't so much a city as a borough of the hive itself, segueing horizontally and upwards with such other townships, settlements and factories as had germinated nearby.

The one border that Cuspseal could define was its base.

Below its adamantium foundations was the under-hive, and there any such abstraction as ''civilisation'' — in short supply even in these supposedly urbane zones — could effectively be ignored.

If the underhive was a madhouse, Cuspseal was its padded walls.

Little wonder that the vindictor precinct owed more in its architecture to some medieval fortress than to the industrial anarchy surrounding it. A perfect cube, it bristled with obvious and massive ordnance, much of it trained on the largest of the cavernous openings into the underworld that dotted the Cuspseal's boundaries: a portal its builders had shrewdly positioned it beside. Tramlines and suspended walkways ringed it on every side, rising in metallic layers that thronged with heavily-cloaked workers.

It had taken Mita three hours to descend this far from the upper spire, riding a succession of increasingly decrepit elevators reserved for authorised personnel. Such was the reality of hive life: the sequential tiers represented not only a geographical strata but a division of status — the princely affluence of the upper tiers supported itself on a gallery of decreasing wealth. At its base the hive was a pit of destitution.

Arriving in the centre of Cuspseal's noxious sprawl hot and irritated by the constant checking of papers, Mita was not in the mood to suffer further indignity.

'This,' she snapped, when finally Commander Orodai entered the anteroom in which she'd been waiting, shadowed by a pair of vindictor sergeants and an aide, 'is intolerable.'

Orodai had the look of a man who had resigned himself to receiving an earbattering. 'Yes,' he said wearily. 'I'm sure it is.'

He was an old man, if indeed his face accurately reflected his age. Where others in his position might have opted for rejuve treatments or augmetic components, his features betrayed the sort of leathered erosion rarely glimpsed in high-ranking personnel. As a member of the Adeptus Arbitus, and therefore operating entirely exclusively of the hive's administration, his command was arguably second only — if not equal — to that of the governor himself. For all that, he was a small man in bland clothing, whose psychic emissions betrayed no sense of self-importance. Mita's overriding impression from his warp-presence was of an impressive dedication to his vocation. Still, decorum must be observed.

'I've been waiting two hours!' she barked, stabbing at the air with a finger. 'The inquisitor will hear of this!'

Orodai arched an eyebrow. 'I dare say he hears of everything else.' He offered her a bundle of parchments, which she snatched with bad grace. 'In any case, it couldn't be helped. Your documents required confirmation and your companion was... unhelpful.'

Ah yes, she thought, my companion...

'Your men called him an ogryn.'

'And?'

'And that wasn't a good idea.'

'No?'

'No. Last time he met an ogryn it kept calling him Tiny.'

Orodai had the look of a man clutching at straws. 'And that was a problem?'

'Not really. It stopped when he pulled off its arms. I demand that you release him.'

Orodai's expression contrived to suggest that she was in no position to be making ''demands'' but he nodded thoughtfully and gestured to the aide. The man scurried away, oozing reluctance. Mita could well imagine why.

'Under normal circumstances we wouldn't allow his... kind in the city,' Orodai said, stroking his grey beard. Though perhaps circumstances are not "normal"'

'You forget,' Mita retorted, 'that it was you who invited the Inquisition's assista—'

'Actually, we invited the inquisitor's assistance, not that of his lackey and her pet, but let's not split hairs.'

Mita's outraged rebuff was spectacularly postponed.

The door parted with its hinges and her companion entered.

Loudly.

His name was Cog, and he was human — broadly speaking. Whatever feral world had sired him had been isolated for millennia, denied the purifying light of the Emperor's influence, and its sparse population had stagnated in a downward spiral of inbreeding and corruption.

Still human, if only just.

Cog and his kin had grown massive. Shunning the need for higher thought, rapid evolution had seen their skins grow thick, their brows brachiate, their chests barrel. Over long centuries of clambering through forests their arms had elongated and formed secondary elbows, their legs had shortened and their hands had grown massive.

Kaustus had found Cog in the slaughterpits of Tourelli Planis, where he was goaded by his captives with energised spears and electroflails, forced to grapple a succession of beasts and automata for the crowd's amusement. His hands had been taken from him, replaced with crude bionics. Watching the giant enter the ring with a tribal prayersong to the Emperor, Kaustus had been impressed with his piety as well as his physique, and had purchased him from the slavers for a princely sum.

Given her own barely-tolerated mutation, since joining Kaustus, Mita had found in Cog an unlikely ally. She knew he regarded her with a simple devotion based on lust, and tolerated his clumsy advances with good grace despite never acceding to them. If stringing-along a gentle giant was all it took to secure his personal loyalty, she judged it a fair price to pay Cog had been her natural choice of companion for this degrading foray into the plebeian morass of the hive's lower tiers, and his puppy-like pleasure at her invitation had been touching. He'd remained at her side ever since, as silent as a statue, until the vindictors of Cuspseal had decided his obvious corruption was a step too far and had him tranquilised. Cog was dragged away in chains, Mita's protests were ignored, and her sympathy for whichever poor devil was eventually chosen to release him had been growing ever since.

Cog didn't lose his temper often. But when he did...

The door, set firmly in a ferrocrete bracket, crumpled like a dead leaf. Cog followed it through with his head dipped and his shoulders hunched, roaring like a hive-tram. The vindictor sergeants reacted as if electrified, staggering away, fumbling for power mauls. A third voice added to their panicky exclamations, and it took Mita a moment to spot Orodai's unlucky aide, clutched in the giant's mechanical hand like a fleshy club.

Cog's beetle-black eyes squinted, seeking the best target, brows collecting in moronic indecision. One of the sergeants settled the matter by thumbing the activator of his maul and shouting: ''Stand down, brute!'' — an attempt at machismo derailed when Cog contemptuously swatted him with the aide's body. Both men tumbled in a confusion of limbs and squeals towards the wall, which vented a layer of mortar dust at their impact. The second sergeant whimpered.

Commander Orodai, by contrast, had reacted with admirable composure, directing his impatient eye at Mita. To her psychic senses he exuded little fear, only an air of irritation at what he clearly considered to be a waste of his time.

Across the room, Cog picked up the second vindictor, plucked off his helmet like the lid from a tube of paint, and crumpled it into a ball between thumb and forefinger. The man — stupidly, in Mita's view — took a ridiculous attempt at a punch to Cog's face, an attack which earned him a rib-splintering bearhug and a casual toss over the giant's shoulder.

Cog turned his attention to Orodai and advanced, metal fingers twitching. A long cord of spittle dangled from his lower lip.

'I think that will do, interrogator,' the commander said, regarding Mita calmly. 'You've made your point.'

She smiled, nodded with faux graciousness, and turned to the advancing monster.

'Cog,' she said. 'I'm fine.' She eked out a small portion of her consciousness and coiled herself around Cog's simple mind, soothing its jagged edges.

'H-hurt you?' Cog said, blinking rapidly. 'Hurted Mita?'

'No,' she said, voice reassuring. 'Look. You see? Not a hair. Now calm!

Cog nodded, accepting her words with child-like trust. He thrust his massive hands into the pockets of his robe and appeared to switch off, like a machine devoid of fuel.

Mita turned to Orodai with a smirk.

'Now,' she said, mollified. 'Perhaps you'd care to explain why you requested our help?'

Orodai's eyes narrowed, twinkling.

'Perhaps it would be best,' he said, and this time it was he who smirked, 'if you see for yourself.'

Sergeant Varitens did not like mutants. Sergeant Varitens did not like psykers. Sergeant Varitens did not like disobedience or poverty or aristocracy or crime. He did not like the underhive, or the upper spire, or indeed the middle tiers.

As far as Mita could tell, skating delicately across the surface of his mind, Sergeant Varitens did not appear to like much at all.

(Sergeant Varitens did not like the Inquisition.)

(Sergeant Varitens did not like women.)

He and Mita were getting along just famously.

'And what is this zone called?'

'Lady, it's the warp's-arse underhive. We don't call it anything.'

'But... these settlements... They must have names. What do the people call th—'

'Look.' Varitens turned away from the Salamander's cab, sighing through the mike of his voxcaster. 'You want to stop and ask some of these filth what they call places, or where the local sights are, or which unfortunate bastard they just ate for dinner, you be my guest. Only don't come running to us when you look down and some godless mutie has his teeth in your leg.'

They travelled in silence after that.

The underhive had not been what Mita had expected. Trawling across its debris-flows and pitted causeways in the vindictors' Salamander, she found herself admiring the diversity, as if there were some secret beauty — some hidden order — lurking in the decay. Here, salvaged waste was gold. She found herself impressed by the colour and vivacity of the sights, as if life had recoiled from the squalor of its environment in a storm of clashing hues and decorations. Gaudy totems leaned from the shadows, bright graffiti announced a dozen changes of territory: each gang name crossed through by its latest conqueror. Underhivers variously raced for cover or came out to watch as the vindictors passed, shady characters with hands reaching for — but never openly wielding — whatever weaponry they hid within heavy cloaks. Here there was vibrancy in the dark — like the perfect scarlet of a deep sea tubeworm — and Mita struggled to despise it as profoundly as Sergeant Varitens so clearly did.

Commander Orodai had assigned the sergeant as her tour-guide. She suspected he'd done so out of spite.

'Tell me, sergeant,' she said, tiring of the silence, 'what manner of crime warrants the attention of the Emperor's glorious Inquisition? And down here in this most...' she parroted his emotionless voice, 'wretched of places, to boot?'

Varitens regarded her for a moment, face concealed within the featureless orb of his visor.

'Murder.'

She blinked. 'We're investigating a murder?'

'More than one. Five confirmed, probably more. We're taking you to the most recent discovery.'

She shook her head. This assignment was growing more and more ridiculous by the instant.

'Sergeant, it's my understanding that there are several hundred unexplained deaths every day. I imagine the figure is far higher in the underhive.'

'You imagine right, lady.'

'Then I'm afraid I don't understand. Why pay such close attention to this one?'

The Salamander turned a corner and began to throttle down, and Mita became aware that her companions were preparing themselves to disembark, hefting mauls and autoguns professionally.

Varitens pointed to a side tunnel, bored from a drift of mangled steel, and cocked his head.

'Through there. You'll understand.'

She had been a missionary, judging by what little of her clothing remained: a white robe with a hemp cord and a reliquary cache slung across her shoulder, embroidered with golden scriptures.

She had come to this deep, dark place to spread the Emperor's light: as brave and selfless a being as one could ever hope to find. Her reward hardly seemed fair.

The robe was shredded.

The hemp cord creaked around her neck as she twisted above the ground.

The reliquary lay shattered at her feet and the fragments of bone from within — the knuckles of some long-dead saint, perhaps — were ground to dust.

'Emperor preserve us...' Mita hissed, stepping into the tunnel.

The woman had not died here — that much was clear. Whatever violence had ended her life would certainly have spilled out across the murder scene: splattering walls and ceilings, pooling in thick puddles underfoot. This was less a scene of frenzy than an exhibit, a calling-card: neat, tidy, arranged.

Her hands were gone. Her eyes had been put out. One foot hung by a single scrap of gristle, the blow that had parted it with such razor ease stopping short — deliberately — of amputation. Her viscera had been evacuated, hanging in translucent loops from the incision across her belly.

And all across her, along every part of her worm-white body, lazy lines had been drawn: fluid ripples and scarlet whorls like the eddies of some mantra-wheel, spinning through holy water. At first Mita had mistaken the lines for red ink, scrawled across the body's skin. She was wrong. Each line was a cut, administered so delicately, so perfectly, that not a drop of blood had oozed clear to spoil the effect.

This was not psychosis. This was art.

And the artist had not shied from signing his work.

Above the body, carved on the rocky surfaces of the borehole in a dipped, tidy hand, an engraved legend picked at the light of Mita's illuminator and drew her eye.

Adeo mori servus Imperator Fictus Ave Dominus Nox.

She felt her gorge rise and turned away, forcing down bile in her throat. Sergeant Varitens, standing behind her with hands on hips, mistook her disgust for miscomprehension, nodding towards the text and clearing his throat.

'It says—'

'Thank you, sergeant,' she hissed, fighting for dignity as well as air. 'I'm quite capable of reading High Gothic.'

She turned again towards the words, and they seemed to writhe in her eyes with a malevolent life of their own. For an instant she felt the stab of shocking, familiar pain — awash with ancient violence and ageless bitterness — and in that moment knew, without any doubt, from where the murderer had come.

A great darkness, descending from the sky.

Something had survived the descent of the Umbrea Insidior...

'Adeo mori servus Imperator Fictus,' she said out loud, forming each word clear and strong. 'So die the slaves of the False Emperor.'

She could feel the vindictors staring at her, fidgeting. Even Cog watched her with troubled bemusement, struggling to understand the words.

'Ave Dominus Nox. Hail to the Lord of the Night.'

Zso Sahaal

They were called the Glacier Rats.

Their name was scrawled across parchment in the clipped hand of a servoscribe, belying the information's remarkableness in neat, tedious words, as if to render it as dull as any other record, sealed neatly with an uncrested daub of wax.

They were called the Glacier Rats.

Sahaal ran the name through his mind again and again, as if testing its mettle.

Tasting it.

The information broker Pahvulti had taken his leave from captivity. Walking free, ignoring the wounds patterning his necrotic skin, his swagger had been that of a victor, as if he'd somehow earned Sahaal's respect — or at the very least incurred his debt. He'd instructed Sahaal on where to find, and when, the information he'd promised, he'd dipped his head in sarcastic obeisance, then he'd smiled and waggled his brows.

'This is a business of credit,' he'd said, cackling his peculiar laugh — 'het-het-het' — like a gear skipping a tooth, 'the question costs nothing. The answers are priceless...'

Sahaal struggled with the urge to rip the man to shreds. Allowing him to simply walk away required every ounce of his concentrated pragmatism.

The silent vow that he would have his revenge later was little consolation.

'And yet I have paid nothing,' he'd hissed, oozing away into the shadows, struggling for some scrap of dignity.

He was denied even that.

'No... no, you haven't.' Pahvulti's one remaining eye fluttered, cycling through lenses like some perpetual wink. 'But then... the first one is always free.'

And then he was gone.

They were called the Glacier Rats.

And yes, Pahvulti's answers had arrived where he had promised, lowered from some unknown tier down a disused elevator shaft, and Sahaal's cursory attempt to distinguish its source had failed. The information broker was far too sly to be so easily undone: wherever he had his base, he was free — for now — of retaliation.

And yes, Sahaal had roared with hunger as he learned his enemy's name, flexed his claws, chanted their name again and again, but even so... even so...

He was not accustomed to being indebted.

The Glacier Rats. The thieves were named the Glacier Rats.

They were a raider band, the document said. A clan of pirates unconcerned with the territorial squabbles of hivegangs, collecting then pawning such valuables as they purloined. Their founder had been a native of the ice-world Valhalla, joining then promptly deserting the Imperial Guard on his first tour of duty, sensing far greater opportunity for wealth in the Equixus hive. His name was Tuahli Teqo, and Sahaal's lips curled in a mirthless smile as he recalled the ugly legend sprawled on the side of the thieves' transport: a tag to honour his memory.

Their current leader, in as much as Pahvulti's spies could keep up with the endlessly changing hierarchies of such clans, was named Nikhae, and was recognisable by the luminous spiral electoo on his forehead.

'Nikhae.'

Sahaal said it out loud, as if to ensure its reality, and waved a single claw through the air, dissecting the very sound of the thief s name.

'Nikhae... Nikhae...'

Yes. Yes, it was him. The false hunchback. The thief. The scum. The worm.

He had taken it.

At the rear of the sheaf of pages Pahvulti included a map. Marked in blotched ink, scrawled thick by Pahvulti's own hand, the centre of the page sported a bold, dark X.

Sahaal checked the straps on the blocky package attached to his waist, its faint green glow shimmering across the blades at his fingertips.

The Glacier Rats. They were called the Glacier Rats.

Every last one of them would die.

Herniatown had fallen from grace.

At its edges the weight of the city had broken its own base and collapsed downwards, whole streets sagging into the abyss. Underhivers kept their distance from Herniatown's bowed arcades, naming it well: its wilted streets were a raw bulge of viscera that had squeezed through the muscle wall above, dipping into inky darkness. Once it had been a part of Cuspseal, but no longer. Nestled at the underhive's anarchic heart, it seemed an invasive probe of order, albeit warped incontrovertibly by its descent.

Herniatown was where the Glacier Rats had made their home.

Sahaal reconnoitred the zone with fanatical care: watching, exploring, never intervening. At three separate junctions — where long-deserted hivehabs met along broad concourses — he'd been forced to stay his arm, as Glacier Rat sentries ambled by.

The time would come, he told himself.

They wore long coats of grey and white, a stylised snowflake — dagger tipped and skull-centred — patterning each lapel. They carried lasguns with the exaggerated care of those who'd purchased their own weaponry, and Sahaal bridled to see such fireworks treated with such reverence. Stalking the shadows of their boundaries, he registered not a single, threat, and formulated their demise with predatory ease.

Their band was well named, he decided. They were scum, untutored and untrained, as meaningless as their namesakes. Rats, yes. And he was the owl.

He laid his plans with care, awaited his opportunity from the shadows, and then struck.

A sentry — young eyes flitting across all the wrong shadows — was the first to die.

Pacing at the town's northern entrance, the youth had never considered turning an eye upon the ventilation stacks halfway along the tunnel he was supposedly guarding, and despite his enormity Sahaal arose from the vent's crumpled innards with the silence and grace of a striking snake.

The sentry's throat was cut before he registered another's presence, and in his brief instant of surprise — if indeed he felt anything at all — it must have seemed like the walls themselves had exuded claws. The body slumped, its knees folded, and Sahaal passed into the shadows long before its head struck the uneven floor with a wet slap.

Herniatown opened around him like a sacrifice bearing its heart, inviting a blade between its ribs, and he obliged it with savage pleasure. He killed another three sentries in parallel streets, impatient for violence, dispatching each with the speed and silence of a wraith. He displayed their bodies artfully, faint lights catching at every wet cut, glistening in unbroken sluices of crimson, and paused in each case only to curse the soul of his victims as if keeping a tally of his revenge.

'Warp take you...' he hissed, helm absorbing every sound. 'Warp eat you whole.'

When finally the noises he had waited so long to hear arose he was poised within the inverted dome of what had once been a chapel. He clung to the ceiling with the damp-claws of his feet, dangling like a bat, and relished every echoing nuance of the Glacier Rats' alarm.

It began with a single cry, flitting across the town like a dream, and then multiplied: first a handful of voices, then a score, each crying out in outrage and anger, demanding reinforcement.

The first body had been found.

Sahaal dropped onto and through the chapel's mosaic floor, gliding along the cracked seams of rock at its base, and hastened to Herniatown's opposite fringe. He used the crawlducts to travel in secret: swatting aside giant roaches and rats as he went, jump pack driving him along like a bullet down a barrel. At the town's southern entrance he hopped from a service hatch and quickly snickered thrumming claws through the meaty joints of the gatekeeper's legs. Scraps of the man's coat twisted aside, blossoming with redness, and his strangled grunt of astonishment warmed Sahaal to his core. The man toppled like a felled tree — more surprised than pained — and thrashed in a deluge of his own blood.

This time Sahaal allowed his victim the privilege of screaming.

Before he left the wailing cripple, arteries belching their vibrant load across tunnel walls, he prised open the man's clenched fist, pushed something hard and round into the cage of his fingers, and nodded his head.

'Don't let go,' he said, tonguing the external address stud of his vox-caster.

Then he was gone.

The man's screams echoed like the howl of a gale, and already the cries of alarm from the north were becoming those of query, groups meeting at intersections, trading orders, pointing fingers, heading south to investigate this new tumult. Sahaal watched them rush about like insects from above, safe within a collapsed attic, and relished their panic. To them it must seem as though their territory were surrounded: imperilled from opposite directions, menaced by unseen attackers.

'Fear and panic,' his master had once said, 'are but two sides of the same die!'

The sentry's screams weakened and died shortly before the bobbing torches reached the south gate. Sahaal imagined him alone in the dark, clutching with increasingly feeble fingers at the grenade in his hand. Sooner or later his grip would falter and the bomb's priming trigger would release.

The foremost group of guards entered the tunnel an instant before the grenade detonated.

To Sahaal, perched like a gargoyle on high, gazing across the levelled towers of Herniatown, the explosion rose like a luminous bubble from the south, its flickering radiance rising across the entire realm. Shadows and highlights were scrawled across every surface, and when the brightness diminished a gout of oil-black smoke twisted, snake-like, above the southern gatehouse.

'Preysight,' Sahaal whispered, and the bitter machine-spirit of his armour nictitated new lenses across his eyeslits, magnifying his view. Brought into sudden and sharp relief, the smoky pall broke apart where the dead and dying staggered, stumbling with faces blackened and limbs gone. There were far fewer than had entered.

Sahaal watched their pitiable lives dwindle away with unashamed pleasure, then leapt from his alcove into the smoke-thick sky, heading downtown.

As he travelled, he took a care to allow himself to be seen. Just brief glimpses flitting across smoky expanses, whooping as he ghosted past hurrying bands of frightened men. He did so at distant points — here in the east, there near the centre, leaping in great arcs across the town's concrete sky. In the ruins of a librium to the west he dropped through a shattered skylight and shrieked at the men below, then vanished, slashing at their faces as he went.

At an intersection in the north he hopped from a crumbling wall onto the back of a transport, claws extending with a silken rasp. Two men were dead before he was even amongst them, heads spinning in the vehicle's wake, and their bodies tumbled beneath its tracks with damp, crackling retorts. The two remaining men opened fire. Sahaal activated the external line of his vox, amplified its volume to a dangerous level—

—and laughed.

Across all of Herniatown, in every honeycomb passageway of its crumbling boundaries, in every sheltered corner beneath its sunless sky, frightened men and women paused to listen, shivering in the dark.

When finally Sahaal turned his attention upon the zone's tilted, sagging centre, any sense of order to the Glacier Rats' search had long since passed. A nightmare stalked the shadows of their domain, and as rumours of its appearance spread — midnight blue and clothed in lightning, long of limb and hunched of back, with eyes that glowed like rubies and claws like sabres — pandemonium reigned.

Sahaal basked in the air above it all, and laughed and laughed and laughed.

The centre had been a colereum, at one time.

A vast hydroponics dome, bristling with sludge-farmed crops, its inwardly-mirrored surface recalled an insect's eye, iridescent and multifaceted. At one time it had disgorged a thousand tonnes of starchpaste every year, diverted among rust-thick pipes to a million habs. At one time.

It had borne its relocation into the abyss with poor grace.

The crops had died when the collapse occurred, their irrigation channels cut forever. What little water filtered into the underhive was tainted by its descent, and those few hardy weeds that had escaped had grown shaggy and truculent, skins thick with mutant bristles. Only the lamps had survived, globular drones of archaic design with thrumming gravmotors and simple logic-minds. They roved the dome with ultraviolet torches blazing, unconcerned with the absence of vegetation, faltering only when their aeons-old fuel reserves perished.

Sahaal straddled the dome like a beetle, limbs moving with insect confidence, drawing himself up its pregnant camber. At its crest he paused, gazed through its scars at the buildings within, and raised his hand to the bandolier straps of his jump pack, plucking at the grenades that dangled there.

The pirates' base was a sprawl of lodges and canvas tents, centred about a stone-walled tower, a fitting headquarters for a leader. There, Sahaal guessed, he would find his prey. Around it guards sprinted between salvage stores and bivouacs with guns brandished, shouting orders, faces milky in the ultraviolet glow. Vehicle engines ignited in a cascade of throaty roars, tracks grinding as they spun towards the colereum's exit.

'We're under attack, Teqo's blood!' Sahaal heard, filtered amongst the screams. 'Dozens of them! All directions!'

A roar from the east told him the bodies of the three slain guards had been found, adding to the confusion, and to the west the dry sound of lasfire — unmistakable in its breathless crackle — supplied the finishing touch.

The Glacier Rats were shooting at shadows.

Nodding, he sunk needle claws into the pinions of the dome, braced every muscle of his body, and closed his eyes.

'In your name, my master,' he said. 'Always.'

And then he drew a breath.

And then he tossed back his head.

And then he screamed.

At its maximum volume, the voxcaster of his ancient helm could burst the veins of a man's skull and turn his teeth to powder. He'd seen men fall paralysed to the floor at the Raptor's shriek, and birds fall stunned from the sky.

In Herniatown, the colereum's mirrored dome exploded.

Dozens of men paused in their panic and glanced up, glimpsed a nightmare figure haloed by ultraviolet, then fell screaming as eyes and mouths filled with splintered glass. Their final sight would haunt the brief remainder of their lives, bathed in a shower of jewelled fragments, a banshee on the crest of a razor-tipped wave.

Then the grenades began to fall, and from each roiling fireball a spume of hooked shrapnel sprayed itself outwards, making mince of flesh.

Sahaal stretched out his claws and exalted in the carnage. He felt for an instant that he could taste the fear of his victims, and tilted his body to rise on its whispering thermals, bathing in the horror he had sown, glorying in his own awesomeness, ascending to deity on wings of terror!

But—

But, no. No!

Even at the peak of such vicious pleasure he shied away, gnashing his teeth. In base exaltations lay an insidious danger. Focus was the key. Always. Focus and devotion.

In vengeance upon the false Emperor, in the name of my Master.

All else was corrupt and meaningless. He must condition himself to feel pleasure in the execution of his work, pleasure at drawing a step closer to his goals... But never pleasure in the act itself.

The fear, the destruction, the death: these were tools. Weapons. Aspects of the artist's palette. Means to an end.

Never the end itself.

He went amongst the dying men with restraint, after that — although those who fell in his path might not have known it. Most were injured, able only to stagger aside as he passed, claws bloodied. He gave little thought to stealth now: whether his panicking prey saw who — what — was in their midst was now irrelevant. None would survive to speak of it.

In a quiet part of his mind he wondered how he must seem to these half-blind worms, supplicating as he passed by, or else cut their throats with the contempt they deserved.

He must appear a giant. He stood far taller than even their mightiest champions, and that despite the hunched posture his armour had adopted. Striding on heavy boots, autoreactive claws flexing at their tips, greaves that tapered towards horn-like knees pistoning above, he moved through their midst like a vulture-treading with care, the twin ridges of his jump pack recalling furled wings, beak-like helm sloping forwards like a jutting jaw.

And where he stepped through curling fronds of smoke and dust, where he moved without fear through sooty flames and hopped across boiling craters, where shadows moved around him like a living mantle, then it was his eyes alone that these dismal rag-men would recall: blazing red, like embers at the heart of a cooling hearth.

The stone tower was all but deserted when he reached it, its guards lying dead from shrapnel wounds at its door, and he swatted the portal from its hinges with a casual shrug. He inhaled as he entered, praying to the cold spirit of his master that here, at last, he would find the prize and its thief.

In the latter respect at least his prayer was answered.

The attack came from above, the flash-flicker of a muzzle igniting warning runes in his eyeplates. He pounced aside even as the hail of lead landed around him, armour whining in protest. Thick plumes of dust and shattered stone danced, and the staccato rattle of a hellfire gun shook the tower from base to tip. The first inelegant sweep of his attacker's hand raked him with lead, and despite the speed of his reaction knocked messy craters into the filigreed surfaces of his armour.

The impacts did not wound him. In those few lucky places that the attacker found his target he failed even to penetrate Sahaal's carapace, inflicting nothing but petulant surface-scars on the midnight blue shell. This was quite enough of an insult to enrage him nonetheless.

He bounded vertically — rising on the wash of his crested engines — and gashed at the wooden spars of the spiral gantry, splinters and singed beams toppling below him, the rhythmic collapse of each level — koom-koom-koom-koom — like the pounding of a fearful heart.

The gunman, lost somewhere in a haze of spinning wood, cried out as his platform dissolved. He skittered broken nails along stone walls, clutching for handholds, and hit the ground with an untidy crunch, leg twisted in fractured angles.

He groaned, struggling against the fuzz of shock.

And then something landed beside him. Something vast, clothed in black and blue. Something with the eyes of a devil, that flexed its claws and hissed like a serpent, that stepped closer and leaned down to inspect him, as a cat might a mouse.

Something that ran a blade, almost tender, across the glowing electoo of the man's forehead.

'Nikhae,' it said.

And finally, hearing his own name from this nightmare's shrouded lips, the man's voice came back to him. His shock parted like thinning smoke, and as the claws reached out to touch him he screamed with the ragged vestiges of his breath. 'Where,' the voice hissed, 'is it?'

Zso Sahaal left Herniatown an hour later, thoughts clouded. The package he had taken with him had been left in his wake, placed carefully amongst the scraps of offal — shredded by the force of his fury — that had once been Nikhae. It would claim the lives of any who remained within the town's sagging grid, but where the thought of such wide-scale revenge should gratify him, Sahaal felt only emptiness.

The Corona was gone.

It had been sold.

Traded.

Bartered, like some plebeian commodity.

He walked from the town's northern entrance without a care for stealth or destination, in a haze, and when a cloaked figure approached from the darkness to bow before him he barely paused, whipping a thoughtless claw into and through its neck in a single motion. The body collapsed and his feet carried him on, and from the shadows a chorus of gasps arose around him. Finally, begrudgingly, he glanced up from the ground to regard this new circumstance.

There were fifty or more, each draped in black, prostrating themselves in terror and awe. More scum, worthy of his blades...

Sahaal sighed, flicked blood from his claws, and prepared for more slaughter.

'H-hail,' one of them said, her wide eyes avoiding his gaze. 'Hail to the Emperor's angel. Hail to the holy warrior.'

Sahaal stared at her, uncertain. He had expected opposition, terror, pitiful aggression — but not obeisance.

'What do you want?' he hissed, and each of them shivered at the sound of his voice.

'O-only to serve you, my lord,' the woman quailed, extending her right hand in a tall salute. 'Ave Imperator!'

And then the Umbrea Insidior's promethium reactor-cell, the bulky package he had removed so carefully from its crippled generarium, reached critical mass in the heart of the Glacier Rats' territory and detonated with the force of a thousand grenades.

The underhive shook, the floor quaked like a living tiling, and as his new congregation cowered around him, Sahaal basked in the phosphorlight of Hernia-town's rain.

Mita Ashyn

Hemmed on all sides by drooping adamantium walls, the force of Herniatown's devastation erupted not outwards, but upwards.

Above Herniatown stood Cuspseal.

Mita had returned to the lower tiers from the under-city beneath a stormcloud of suspicion and fear. The psychic resonance of the murdered woman — a spectral shadow that only she had felt — had affected her profoundly, and as Sergeant Varitens stalked off to report to his commander she had hastened to a control room at the precinct's peak, pushing aside servitors and tech-acolytes in her haste to reach the communications consoles.

She was thus ensconced, struggling with the infuriating business of conferring with Inquisitor Kaustus, when the quake hit. It had almost been a relief.

Given that the hivelink — a mass of switchboard feeds crammed amongst ducts city-wide — was prone to broken signals and interferences, and that the control room's bustle was as endless as it was raucous, she had expected Kaustus's quiet tones to be rendered inaudible. As it was, his reaction to Mita's report was easily gauged despite its volume: describing to him the particulars of the murders had been an object lesson in futility, and his voice had dripped with an utter lack of interest. She began to appreciate why Orodai had insisted she see the slaughter for herself. Mere words could not hope to describe it.

'...desecration on a... a savage scale, my lord, and—'

'Savage, you say?' his clipped tones had dripped with scorn. 'And in the underhive, no less? Imagine that.'

She'd fancied she could hear him rolling his eyes.

'My lord, I... I know it must seem... insignificant, and perhaps my regard for it appears ridiculous to you, but—'

'It does not appear ridiculous, girl. It is ridiculous. Worse, it is a waste of my time. Murders in the underhive! You're a servant of the Inquisition, not some underling lawman sent to solve every tawdry crime.' He huffed loudly, and Mita had imagined him toying with the tip of one polished tusk. 'You will in future not burden me with every tedious item of detail that y—'

'But my lord, I felt such darkness! It... it hangs like a cloud! A shadow in the warp!'

The link's brass speaker, fashioned in the shape of a gasping fish, fell silent. Mita had stared at it, uncertain. Had he severed the connection?

'M-my lord?'

Kaustus's voice had been cold when at last he spoke.

'You will never interrupt me again. Is that quite clear?'

Her stomach had knotted. 'O-of course, my lord. My apologies.'

'My patience has limits, child. Do not test them.'

'I am sorry, my lord, truly... It's just that...' she'd fumbled for words, the memory of the body twisting her guts, flickering before her. Its naked shape haunted every blink and its empty eyes — hollows that led only to shadow — regarded her mutely from her own mind. Should she say it? Should she voice her suspicions? By the Throne, she'd been so sure, but now that she came to it, now that it needed to be spoken, suddenly it sounded ludicrous. Melodramatic. Too much.

But the words!

Adeo mori servus Imperator Fictus, Ave Dominus Nox.

The words had filled her with such certainty that she'd all but screamed her fears when she saw them, biting her tongue all the way back to Cuspseal, desperate to tell her master.

She must tell him. She must.

In the control room, staring at the voicetube with her stomach churning, she'd taken a breath, composed herself, injected formality into her tone, and said it.

'Inquisitor, it is my belief that the taint is abroad within the hive.'

This time the pause had dragged long and deep, and when he spoke Kaustus's voice was so quiet that she'd strained to hear his words.

'Chaos?' he'd whispered. 'You think the city harbours Chaos?'

She'd choked back a retch at the very word, and had gripped the speakertube as if clinging for dear life.

'Yes, my lord,' she said, committed. 'Or... or something like it, Emperor preserve.'

'Interrogator Ashyn,' Kaustus had said finally, and it seemed to Mita that a strange new element had entered his tone, a hint of ice that had not registered before. 'We are servants of the Ordo Xenos. We have come to this world to unmask the cancer that is xenophilia. That is the course we shall pursue.'

'But—'

'You are young, interrogator. Already you have served two masters. You lack continuity. You lack experience. You are unqualified in the ways of Chaos.'

'But... my lord,' she'd struggled with the plug of frustration in her throat. Why could he not trust her? What reason could he have for such belligerence? 'My lord, I feel it. I sense it. It stalks the shadows...'

'That,' and his voice had allowed no room for argument, no hope of persuasion, 'is not in your power to diagnose. Is that all, interrogator? Or do you have more spurious assertions to make?'

Standing there with mouth agape, a forked pathway had presented itself to her, and she had closed her eyes to explore its shimmering angles. Beyond the guiding techniques of the psi-trance, without even consulting the lesser arcanoi of the Imperial tarot, she knew that such echoes of the future — uninvited and uncontrolled — should be mistrusted. They presented fickle visions of what might be, writhing on skeins of chance, and the adept-tutors at the Scholia Psykana had warned their charges to be wary of their deceptions.

Nonetheless, the options had been as vibrant as had she been seated in her meditation cell, and she'd regarded them with the tranquillity of a practiced, competent psyker.

On the one hand she could return to her master's side. She could kow-tow to his desires, disregard her own judgements, suppress the condemnation of his eccentricities and accept his authority. She could trust in his righteousness and serve him with the devotion his rank deserved. In time, she could see, she would gain a portion of his respect.

Or she could believe what her heart told her: a path that ran ragged with uncertainty, violence and blood.

And glory.

'My lord,' she'd said, enslaved to her ambition. 'I would ask your blessing in undertaking a hunt.'

'A hunt.'

'Yes my lord. For the killer.'

The speaker crackled softly, as if astonished by her request.

'Interrogator,' it said eventually. 'Either your brain is addled by the crudity of your surroundings or your insolence is greater even than I had feared. Your request is d—'

And then the connection had broken, the lights flickered, and the world turned on its head.

The way Mita saw it — during the hours of madness that followed the quake — an interrupted refusal was no refusal at all.

In a metropolis as densely populated as the hive, any upheaval causing fatalities in the mere hundreds could barely be considered calamitous. Nor was Cuspseal's regimented architecture overly disturbed by the subterranean blast: its buttresses and spindled towers continued to stand, its bleak factories barely paused in their ceaseless grind, and its cabled walkways simply swayed before resuming their sprawl. And if here or there a habstack found its view altered, or a chapel leaned from its foundation where before it stood proud, then the teeming masses could be relied upon to shrug and thank the Emperor-on-high that the quake had not been more devastating. The ancientness of this skyless place weighed heavily, and deep in their hearts each hiver felt its fragility keenly. It was a house of cards, a tower of glass, and would require but one carelessly cast stone to crumble.

The floor of Cuspseal had developed a tumour. Where centuries before Herniatown had sagged into the shadows, now it had returned in contempt of those baroque towers built on its spine. It shrugged off the habs and trams and levered itself upright, its ceiling bulging from the Cuspseal foundation like some malign growth. It was here, at the disaster's epicentre, that the loss of life was greatest: hivers tumbling from splintered roads, crushed between pounding slabs. Dust boiled up and out like a living thing, breeding a race of staggering mud-caked zombies. In places the rising hillock split, plumes of molten metal rising from its rents, and there the explosion could vent itself, great tongues of fire licking the bases of gantries above. The stink of flesh wrestled with screams of terror for dominance, and for a brief hour Cuspseal resounded not with the usual factorial tumult, but with the sights and scents of a warzone.

It was perhaps a reflection of hive existence that the city barely paused in its industry at the quake's arrival. In the tier above it, or a single kilometre to either side, there the hive was as oblivious as was Governor Zagrif himself, insulated in the hive's peak. If any aristocrat from Steepletown found his apartments powerless for the instant it took ancient rerouters to correct the blip, or if some high-tier merchantman discovered his flow of mouldpaste interrupted before he could reassign his contracts, then such things could be attributed to the whims of the hive ghosts, or the will of the Emperor, or — at the very least — to just another aspect of the creaking, ineffective workings of hive life.

Cuspseal was all but back to normal within two hours, and the only factor of any note to have changed was the spiralling determination of a single woman to investigate exactly what was going on in the underhive.

'You want what?'

'You heard me. A squad of twenty men. Fully armed, fully armoured.'

'I see.' Commander Orodai sat back in his chair and steepled his fingers, raising an ironic eyebrow. 'Anything else? A set of wings?'

Mita waved a dismissive hand. She'd been too patronised by far less pleasant individuals to be bothered by Orodai's sarcasm.

'I think the men will suffice, for now. And a vehicle, of course.'

He nodded with false earnestness. 'Naturally.'

Orodai's office was a barren space, windowless, made all the less welcoming by the indistinct rusding of servitors in the shadows beyond his desk. Evidently the commander travelled often between the precincts beneath his control, and only his staff of mindless scribes remained constant.

'Save your sarcasm, commander. Whether it pleases you or not, this request carries the full weight of the Inquisition's authority, an—'

'Ha, yes. And is therefore not a "request" at all. It's a demand, girl, and you'd be better off calling it by name. I haven't time for your niceties.'

'Call it what you want. It's all the same in the end.'

Orodai regarded her beneath heavy brows, as if weighing her character by her looks alone. Judging by the taste of his thoughts, he didn't regard either with fondness.

'Let us pretend,' he said, 'that I give you what you want. What sort of madness are you planning on leading my men into?'

'We go to hunt the killer, commander.' This time it was her turn to cock an eyebrow. 'You remember? The one you invited our aid in capturing?'

'I remember. And I remember inviting aid to spare my men the trouble, not to draw them away from more important du—'

'Ah... Then you consider the Inquisition fit only for insignificant pursuits?'

'That's not what I—'

'But you just said as much.' She crossed her arms. 'If I were less charitable, I might consider that assertion to border on the heretical...'

She left the veiled threat dangling, watching him carefully.

He knew he was beaten. And in his thoughts — which of course he believed to be entirely private — he cursed her venomously. Inwardly, Mita joined him, briefly hating herself for steamrollering the objections of such a fundamentally honest man. She assuaged her guilt by reminding herself of the mission's importance. She could brook no concessions, no compromises.

'Fine,' Orodai snapped, hunching forward in his seat. 'Have the damned men. But how you plan to find a single killer amongst a multitude is a trick I'd love to know.'

She half smiled, dipping in a bow of genuine gratitude. 'I have my ways.'

'You'll need them,' he said, unimpressed. 'That quake started below. It's going to be messy down there, girl. Messy and mad.'

Orodai's predictions were unerringly accurate.

It was as if the subterranean blast had expelled not only fire and ash, but some indiscernible smog of insanity. In every settlement around the ruined husk of Hemiatown, across every sumpflow and debris-dune, madness had spilled out from the shadows to reclaim its domain.

Most visible amongst the agents of lunacy were the Purgatists — sinister preachers enmeshed in suits of barbs and bones, lashing at the groaning crowds with hook-tipped whipcords. They prophesied the Emperor's return in a hail of blood and smoke, and attested in crazed tones to his wrath. In the city above Mita had noticed advocates of the movement on street corners and mezzanine junctions: moderates with earnest voices and scarred faces, the marks of quiet zeal and self-flagellation.

Not so in the undercity, where eccentricity bred delusion and piety begot fanaticism.

The Purgatists here yelped and howled, struck at the willing crowd, set alight pyres containing ''mutants'' and ''witches'', and cast quivering fingers towards where Herniatown had once stood, citing the Emperor's splendid venom as the force that had purged so utterly the Glacier Rat filth.

Passing by the lunatic zealots, Mita couldn't prevent a guilty thought from seeping through her defences: Is insanity the price of faith?

The deranged-but-pious were not alone in seizing the prospects presented by the explosion. To the gangs the explosion marked not only a territorial opportunity in the Glacier Rats' wake, but a power vacuum. Total war had come to the underhive.

The crackle of distant gunfire struggled to be heard above the shouts of combatants and the thunder of collapsing buildings, gutted by fire or otherwise undermined. On several occasions gangers themselves, flamboyantly dressed in the colours of their pack, appeared beside the debrisflows to snap off a few optimistic rounds at the vindictors in their trio of Salamanders, before vanishing into their warrens like ghosts. Mita thought it somehow exotic: like jewelled wildlife glimpsed at a forest's edge.

The vindictors, of course, endured these sightings with less sentimentality, taking turns to rise into the Salamanders' open-topped diases, vying to pick off those unfortunates unable to seek cover. Mita endured the noisy distractions poorly, struggling to remain focused.

In less enlightened times a hunter might follow a trail of prints, or spend days pursuing rumours and sightings. To Mita such crudities were unthinkable: the maelstrom of emotion that comprised the psychic environment was as perceptible to her as the scorched earth of its roads or the buckled struts of its walls. The shadow she sought — an oilslick of malign influence and, yes... yes, she was certain, the taint — wound its way throughout like a spectral cord. Whether it represented the killer's exact trail or not was irrelevant, its loci were places he had been, its tentacles were the paths of people he had stalked. Without a clue as to who or what the killer was, she nonetheless tracked his flavour, she followed the strings of his emotion, blossoming and nebulising in his wake. He was angry.

Angry, and cold and bitter.

'Right at the junction,' she instructed the Salamander's pilot, eyelids closed, and watched the manoeuvre through a spectrum that employed neither light nor colour.

The trail had led them on a merry dance already, and she dimly suspected the Preafects thought she was inventing as she went. She couldn't care less.

Their first destination, against Sergeant Varitens's noisy protests, had been the perimeter of the contested zone itself, where Herniatown had once stood. That pulverised area of metallic slag and scorched earth — its walls and ceilings presenting not a single straight line or right angle in their fractured surfaces — had clamoured in her mind with the darkness she'd been seeking, and briefly she'd thought the killer must have died in the inferno. He'd been present, she had no doubt of that. When Herniatown belched itself out of existence he'd been there, at the thick of whatever action had transpired, and she considered the possibility of his death with an uncomfortable thrill of disappointment.

But, no... The trail had reappeared, coal-black, leading away from the ruined zone into the darkness of the western caverns. She led the convoy away from the petty gang squabbles, away from the central settlements with their vestiges of civilisation and their ranting Purgatists, and she resumed the hunt with guilty pleasure.

It had not taken the Preafects long to grasp the reality of their leader's psychic gifts. Mita guessed that had it not been for Cog's silent presence, great machine-hands clenching and unclenching around the autocannon trigger on the tank, their regard for her authority might have been less complete. As it was, they did what she told them when she told them, throwing nervous glances towards the giant — and if they did so without the salutes they would have offered their own commanders it was a detail she was happy to forgo. The one remaining irritation was the interminable mumbling of Sergeant Varitens, who insisted on standing beside her, arms crossed, as if keeping her in his sights could keep her (clearly heretical) mutation in check.

She huffed at the off-putting mussitation — a prayer, she guessed — and refocused, fighting the exhaustion that such intense meditation inevitably caused.

The killer's influence wended its way through a knot of twisting alleys — a filigree of black and blue on the very cusp of her psychic sight — and she guided the pilot through with a calm voice, ignoring the hammering of opportunistic bullets on the tank's sides. As the vehicle clambered from the labyrinth onto a rising steppe of detritus, tracks struggling for purchase, an uncomfortable silence settled, leaving her alone with only the sound of the Salamanders' engines.

Strange shapes loomed in the dark, and at first she mistook them for mighty oaks, grown beyond normal scale, their branches rising above, ghostly lights adorning their tips. Only when perspective adjusted itself in her mind that her eyes decoded what they were seeing.

Vast ducts, each a hundred metres across, littered with scaffold and piping, branching in myriad patterns between floor and cavernous ceiling. At odd points on their colossal trunks hellish lights blazed angry red, steam geysering from every rent, and Mita realised with a stab of amazement that she was seeing thermal ducts, siphoning heat from the planet's crust where even the frozen fluctuations of its weather could not hope to diminish it. From below the entire hive drank the warmth of Equixus, and as the vehicles passed by she found herself humbled, forgetting for an instant the trail she followed.

Varitens's mutterings finally snapped both introspection and temper.

'Sergeant, for the love of the Emperor, would you be quiet.'

He glared, helmet clenched between nervous fingers.

'It's come to a bad thing,' he grumbled, 'when a soldier's denied a prayer for his soul.'

'You feel the need to pray?' she scowled, curling a lip. 'You have twenty men with unfeasibly large weapons standing right behind you, sergeant. What's to be afraid of?'

At this his grizzled mouth twitched in a pale imitation of a smile. Even afflicted by terrors of his own, the prospect of highlighting her ignorance was too delicious for him to pass up.

'This here is the Steel Forest, girl,' he said, nodding out into the canopy of tangled pipes and pilot lights.

'You told me you didn't know any names.'

'And I don't — unless they happen to be the sorts of places it's best to avoid.' He turned towards the viewing slot, glaring out into the dark. 'This is where you'll find the Shadowkin. And they don't much like intruders.'